GRUMPY OLD BASTARD HEARS THE RAIN

 

Another all day rainy day. Sprinkles, nowhere near a gully-washer, a soak into the ground kind of rain, the kind that waters everything gently and raises the receding water table. It's a beautiful day with the leaves everywhere glossy reflecting silver sky. The wild violet stems extend straight up, leaf open to receive the damp air, dance when struck by a drop fallen from the tree above. Trees soften the force of the rain hitting the ground like they soften the wind and summer sunlight. I must live at least near, preferably among trees. I've never understood the determined American genocide on trees. I do, but also don't. Money is the answer and the passion for money disregards everything else. Mammon is not a benevolent god. I must go to netflix and bring up that Jeff Goldblum movie, Independence Day. I remember being disappointed by its Hollywood silliness, but also remember it had quite a lot to say. Big alien mining spaceships were killing off everything living and scooping up the earth's crust for the minerals. We  had no defense. They were scooping up everything, already had half the USA and heading this way. Koch Brothers. Exxon. And a long list more. They have the money. They control the economy. The Appalachian chain, source of water for the eastern half of the continent, is being fracked from one end to the other. Our continent is being made into a desert under our feet, the politicians advancing the desolation kept popular among the people by propaganda. When Yellowstone blows, the western half of the US continent will be rendered desert. The eastern half will turn desert without water. No force is powerful enough to reverse this momentum. It will be known on maps as the Great American Desert. Too many people controlling so much money they have bought our government and turned it against us. We'll soon see the military, too. It's documented in the news every day, we're all watching helplessly, hopelessly, not wanting to admit it. Take another happy pill. Burn anothern. Thank you, Jesus.

 

 

I really did not want to go there. It's so ridiculous now, noticing the obvious is called liberal. Pay the least attention to the obvious and you're a liberal. Liberal, BR (Before Reagan), meant something. Left meant something. AR (After Reagan), liberal and left wing mean, admits to observing the obvious. Conservative and right wing mean, buys hate propaganda. Neither side of the artificial divide created by propaganda has anything to say for itself, but plenty to say about hate for the other side and everyone concerned. The economic depression is artificially created. Major corporations are expatriating themselves, like Walgreen moving its offices to Switzerland, to evade paying US taxes for soaking us. The one percent are talking about the ninety-nine percent coming to get them with pitchforks. What arrogance. Delights me that the Worthington coat of arms has pitchforks. Now that we have a party for teabaggers, why not a party for pitchforkers. Only problem is, I want simple, not complicated. How about no party at all. How about I just stop paying attention to the irrelevant. The American political system has rendered itself irrelevant. So why pay it any mind? Why reward ignorance with attention? I can't stop them, can't change them. They have all power over me. So the Supreme Court appoints Sarah Palin president. What can I do? Watch it on tv. I have no power over them, not even recourse. Best thing for me to do is hunker down at home and feed carrots to donkeys, amen. I must clear my head of the garbage. At the same time, the world around me is crumbling, falling apart, breaking down. How can I ignore it? It doesn't touch me here at my donkey meadow, yet. I go into town and see a few people I know and we speak for a few minutes, friendly.

 

 

I remind self the people I live among, the people I know, facebook friends, are my world. The rest of it is a mental construct in my head built with imaginary Legos of false information. Why occupy mind with false information that is propaganda anyway. What do I lose by withdrawing my attention from the false? Nothing. What do I gain from more attention to my immediate surroundings, to the people in my life, to cat and donkeys? Everything. My life. Among the people I know, on my mountain with cat, donkeys, facebook and blogger is where my attention belongs, not feeling hopeless and helpless witnessing democracy go away out in the open and its demise be a popular thing. The water on my mountain has been poisoned by Christmas tree cultivation. The native trout that survived Waterfalls Creek being fished out and DDT runoff several decades ago have been wiped out at last by fake notions about the Christ. What can I do but laugh and go on? I'm glad the water table went down from subdivision use; it dried up my spring so I can't drink poison water from it. The water I drink now comes from a well, a few layers of rock below, but poison nonetheless. They ask why so much cancer is going around, blaming everything except that the water of the eastern half of the USA is poisoned at its source, the springs in the mountains, all up and down the Appalachian chain. Poisoning the water has too much money invested in it to stop. I find it heartening that I don't have a great deal longer. In Homelandia, as it is becoming with our ethical foundations being swept away by the television and affection for money, together, adding up to a great black hole of emptiness in greater American culture. Why do I feel so compelled to pay attention to the false workings of the Death Star that are false at the core? Drama? Am I afraid I'll miss something? Am I seeing history unfold? It's engagingly interesting to look at it as history, though the line must be drawn and adhered to, to keep emotion out of it. How do I do that when I think I care? Educate myself to uncare? Yes. What is it to care about? It doesn't care about me.

 

by constantine manos

a greek portfolio

 

I was trained from childhood up to care about America the Democracy, not Homelandia. Now I have  nothing where my-country-tis-of-thee is concerned. The feeling is something like it must have felt to be Hungarian when the Soviet Union incorporated Hungary. How could Hungarians care when missiles, tank cannons, an entire army and air force were aimed at them? No recourse. Hunker down, let it be. Follow Voltaire's counsel, mind my own garden. I'll shepherd my own flock, tend my donkeys, visit with friends, stay home and pursue my art interests, hold Caterpillar, go on doing what I do, but keep my mind out of the swirling cesspool of false values. Why not give more mind to thinking about the nature of God? It's a subject infinitely interesting, something like sailing; no matter how many years you've done it, how much or what kind of experience you've had, there is always something new to learn. I must lift the sights of my interior world, raise self above paying attention to ignorance, read in scriptures instead. Wouldn't that be a good exercise. Keep a Tao te Ching at hand to open it when I feel the impulse to turn on radio news. Read a verse from Lao Tzu and dwell in it for five minutes. I daresay it is a tempting exercise. It could be done at first when I feel like it, then maybe as an exercise for a day, kind of like stopping smoking a day at a time. Let go of paying attention to propaganda called news, clear my head of it a day at a time. Let it go like a helium balloon, watch it shrink to a pinpoint in blue sky and vanish. What do I care about current history anymore? I'd rather read Henry Miller's Rosy Crucifixion. I'd rather look at pictures in a book of photographs by Constantine Manos, A Greek Portfolio, photographs of rural island people who continue to live the traditional ways. People living so remotely they don't know what is going on in Athens but through rumor, changed to unrecognizable by the time it reaches them, and they really don't want to know. That's what I want to be, a donkey herder in the mountains. I must let go of the interest that holds my ear to the daily soap opera from the dark side and tune attention more to the light side, to poetry, good writing, scriptures, music, rain.

 

color photos by tj worthington

 

 

*

     

DETATCHING FROM DISINFORMATION

robert rauschenberg

Every day I see links to articles about inequality in America and today a video of Paul Krugman talking about inequality with Bill Moyer. It's like the latest new thing everybody talks about for a spell, then the subject changes to something else. Nothing gets solved, nothing gets done to correct a situation. Articles are written, pundits speak with the authority of movie reviewers. They talk like it came outta the blue, nobody ever heard of it, though I've seen the inequality my entire life, have lived it throughout my life from ww2 to present. I went to school with black kids who lived in shacks. Not plugged into Propaganda Central I don't have voices in my head telling me what I see is not the case. I look at the world television portrays us inhabiting, upper middle class and middle class, which may be so in some big city neighborhoods. The rest of us cannot afford a Lexus advertised on football, golf, etc. Prices are going way up really fast and we don't hear anything about inflation rates. Wages for working people are going down, not up, because of the freeze on wages over the last 30 years of inflation. The Bank is draining us to the point it has become a Blood Bank for the vampires that drink our blood, corporate CEOs and execs buying legislation to funnel our economic life energy to them, and by now have rendered Democracy illegal. When something like Democracy goes away, it doesn't come back any time soon. After all the American wars in my lifetime, seeing the beginning of rock n roll, women's liberation, sexual liberation, the drug world, the most significant turn of events I've witnessed is the popular end of Democracy in America, the popular diminishing of individual rights, the progression into popular police state. My feeling is the obsessive American passion for money attracted the demons from the dark side. An entire nation that worships money and rules the defenseless countries of the world with aggressively arrogant rudeness is a magnet for evil (hate) and cannot stand. This isn't prophecy. It's simply natural law, like gravity.

 

alex katz

 

As I read it thus, it doesn't mean I blame anything or anybody. I've come to see it a process, the wheel of fortune, turning, turning. We had our peak at the end of ww2. It's the nature of American government never to make an intelligent decision. A couple centuries accumulation of money-informed decisions is where we're stranded now. A kid I knew cheated his way all the way through jr high and high school. By the time he made it to the 12th grade, he didn't have what it took. He hadn't learned anything. It came time to produce and he had nothing. It's racism that has us stumped. Persecuting racists by making issues of them gets nowhere. It only makes them mad. The civil rights period got some laws changed, but didn't change American WASP racism. The decision makers in the corporate towers are far more racist than the redneck with a confederate tag on his pickup's front bumper. Nobody is pointing the finger at the corporate towers for racism. We don't provoke the ones that rule us. What's new about inequality? What's new about nothing done to change it toward the good of all concerned? It is at this point in seeing the landscape around my world, the grid my world lives on without recourse, something I cannot participate in attached to it. I cannot care anymore. I'm told not caring is neurotic. So I'm neurotic. Duh. I confess. Now let's get on with it. I came to the mountains because I saw police state coming, didn't know how, didn't know when, but definitely inevitable as a fighter jet flying in a straight line at the side of a mountain too late to steer away. I wanted to be living comfortably on the least possible, intuiting that hard times would be here before my spirit abandoned this old house. I'm detaching myself from concern about American Democracy, what there was of it, about the corporate coup that bought our government from under us, a hostile takeover. I can't care. It's the same as hearing about 16 sherpas snuffed by a surprise avalanche in base camp. What can my concern do about an avalanche on the other side of the earth a week ago? I can send a prayer for their families, can't send them money.

 

rene magritte

 

It's not my world. I can't worry about the refugee camps in Darfur. Had to stop watching a documentary about half way through. I couldn't help, nothing I could do, not even an opinion, not even a prayer. It's way bigger than me. I have to leave that one to God. It's God sized horror. I can't even afford to go over there to bury the dead. So why am I agonizing myself watching these people who have been through suffering beyond the realm of my imagination? This is for God to sort out, not me. I cannot wring my heart completely dry over horrors all over the earth all down through time since before the hairless ape left the trees. I believe we brought it out of the trees with us. God telling us to settle down and get used to each other, see if you can like one another, over and over, and all it does is make a new religion to go to war with the other religions. Killer is in us deep. It is slow to grow out of, a habit, a tradition. This time we're in is stirring it up to the surface to be dealt with. I see it something like the psychiatric couch. Bring the knot up from deep within, talk about it, think about it, understand it and, poof, the knot is gone. I don't want to be a participant in a belief system that believes killing solves problems. So I live outside society. I've withdrawn from paying attention to politicians. I wonder every day why anybody pays attention to Ted Cruz, wonder if anybody really does pay him any mind. He makes Sarah Palin look like an intellectual whiz-bang. It's a television circus show, a cluster of bubbles blown by a child, drifting on the breeze, popping one at a time until the last one. It floats on and by surprise goes pop. It's slow to break the mental habit of paying attention when Clarence Thomas and the Supremes decide against democracy again and again. I tell myself this old democracy didn't work anyway. Like when it's time to erect a bigger building, the old building needs to be torn down first. Maybe a new enlightenment is ahead that will save us from ourselves. To hell with it. I'm going to sit on my mountain, watch donkeys graze, read Henry Miller and Naguib Mahfouz, be as vacant to the world out there as Blanche DuBois. It's asking an awful lot of myself. Comical to think about, but that's it. I listen to five minutes headline news on the hour once a day. I still like to keep up with the fiction to see how it unfolds day to day. No more documentaries about suffering I can't fix.  

 

henry miller

 

This has been a good week of not paying attention to anything in Washington DC or the world. I know about the Korean ship sinking. I can feel sympathy. But there is a disaster someplace every day, just like there is a baby born every day and somebody dies every day. It's the nature of this world. Pull my attention in closer to home, get my head out of the cloud of disinformation and misinformation called news, read more, relax more, let the players have at it. In jr high and high school I hated it I was required to go to football and basketball games, parents hated paying for it too. But it was better than being at home. I don't want to participate in that world anymore. I want to stay at home, read, watch good movies, make things, watch the squirrels and birds outside the window. This morning I heard the first bluejay. Clear sharp ring. I love the sounds they make. Felt good to have them back. Yellow finches are passing through. I step out the door and squirrel tails dart off in different directions and vanish up a tree. The birds scatter all at once, the doves most dramatically. The donkeys see me step out the door and start walking to the gate. Jack brays, Jenny wheezes, I greet them by name. Jenny is different every day. This morning she deferred to Jack to let him have first carrot. She'd been demanding it for herself. They're doing their mating routine recently. I'm seeing that Jack has spells. First two days, she is kicking him all the time, big power kicks. Third day he kicks her all day long. Fourth day, he takes her by the back of the neck with his teeth and breaks her down. She sprained her right front ankle 4 days ago. It got bad, then better. Today she's walking like before. It was from all their jumping around. Whatever is going on between them, Jack is Alpha donkey the last few days. He walks like it, too. He's a big proud bull donkey. It cracks me up to see mild mannered Donkey Jack whose temperament is even all the time turn into a bull and set his ears just right like tv antennae called rabbit ears. He transforms from Donkey Jack to Alpha Donkey. It's not like he struts his stuff, but like he's a bull with feet firm on the ground. Jenny walks around with her head down more than usual. Jack I see with his head up. I'd guess that inside a week Jack will be keeping his head lowered and Jenny will be Alpha Donkey again. They go through this cycle periodically.    

 

 

zhang ziyi in the house of the flying daggers

 

 

*

 

 

SURREALISM IN AMERICA AND DONKEYS IN THE HAY

donkey jen

 

 

The last few weeks I've been training myself to hear the misinformation of the day, aka the news, with dispassion. I want to be able to hear American news as unengaged as if it were North Korean news. The part of the news that matters in Washington DC is of no relevance to me. I cannot be a participant in democracy because democracy is over. I enjoy listening to BBC international in the night to hear about events in the African countries. Only because Africa is the only part of the world American news never mentions, except for American military involvements in North Africa. Something the government in Sierra Leone did has the same relevance to me as the latest foothold in the American right wing's takeover of the US government. A few of the democrats are attempting to alert us to what is happening, but I'm thinking most of the democrats have their hands in the same pockets as the republicans. What's really going on is taking place on the top floors of skyscrapers and we the people are the ants crawling inline on the ground. Of course, they can't take us seriously. We, the non billionaires, are the same as ants. Step on them--so what? Scorch them with a magnifying glass--so what? Destroy their economy and take all their resources--so what? Pour gasoline down the hole and throw a match on it--so what? I do like to keep abreast of what is behind a sudden surge in yard sales, selling used clothes on facebook, daycare centers closing. Paying attention to current events I have come to see the people playing the headlines game, keeping their faces on the cover of Newsweek, are ruthless and devoid of caring. They're from the dark side. Their way of life is the dark side. By way of life, I mean consciously bleeding our economy. Why should I give them so much attention?

 

donkey jack

 

 

At Sri Aurobindo's center in Pondicherry, on the southeastern coast of India, the room where the international newspapers are read they call the Room of Lies. Gore Vidal's summation of why we have no history is it is written from diaries, journals, letters, memoirs, all of which are self serving, and newspaper articles, which we all know are inaccurate. 1-2-3-therefore: we have no history. Why do I take it as anything but what it is? The news is a corporate daily soap opera that is bigger business than tv football, basketball, baseball, the works. It's a big money tv show. Corporate news has the stamp of approval by level headed businessmen that have our best interest at heart. Like Godzilla had Tokyo's interest at heart. I haven't paid attention to tv news in so many years that when I see something inadvertently at somebody's house or in a restaurant, I'm stunned. They're not touching any subject seriously. Their haiku brevity telling it in the least words possible with a moving picture of a familiar face, an explosion, an image of military might, is impressive when I listen to the script as a concisely written brief documentary poem. Very well paid script writers work backstage. Headlines and images interspersed with commercials for tires and hyper expensive cars, razors, underarm deodorant with ingredients hardly a computer could spell, a peek-a-boo shot between a hot babe's legs on the beach at Cancun with a guy that lifts weights--they're having a rare, expensive beer. When you don't see tv for a long time, it's as hysterical as Sponge Bob Square Pants. We surely are in a time of surrealism. I think of the Hangover movies. They are Marx Brothers funny, and every bit as surrealist. 

 

donkey jen

 

 

I watch the race with my friends on Sunday, a commercial comes on, the channel is switched to a football game. A commercial comes on, we're back at the race track, or if commercials are still on the race channel, switch to another football game and watch until the next commercial, then back to the race. I have a ball. I don't know what they're watching, but I'm watching surrealism in everyday life. As I let go of the belief system that more is better, I see the surrealism that comes to us through what we call media. I cannot go there. I can, however, see some tv every once in awhile, like looking at an exhibition of surrealist paintings. It's like watching a movie of tv trends of the present. I cannot give myself over to hypnosis by the corporate media listening to them tell me over and over I'm no good unless I have fill-in-the-blank that I can't afford. I don't want it in my mind and don't want it in my consciousness. Last Sunday I chose not to go see the race because I was in a relaxed place and did not want to enter that mind of coercion to buy something I don't want. It's so bad that after a pit stop, the announcer is required to say, "he filled up with Sunoco racing fuel." Sunoco is funding the race with big money and they want the product mentioned a certain number of times per hour. I know it's all business, it's how things are done, we couldn't have the race without it. Sometimes it's over the edge. I see tv as bringing a continuously changing billboard into my home, my quiet space. I'm not filling up my space with noise about potato chips, mattresses, crappy tacos, windshield wipers, cellphones, stuff, stuff, explosions, none of it anything I want. Sunday was a day I did not want that belief system in my head, even as a folklorist observer.

 

donkey jack

 

 

I rested and worried in the bed between spells of sleep about the donkeys in the cold at night, in the cold rain. I wanted to convert small chicken shack to a shelter for the donkeys. Had to tear out a rotted floor I put in at least 25 years ago and a wall. It's not as complicated as it sounds. I borrowed a power jigsaw that cuts through nails easily. Opened the wall up, no problem. Backed the car down to the barn, tossed a heavy, tightly-packed bale of good hay in the trunk, left the lid up and drove up to a place I could throw the bale over the fence and roll it down to the donkey den. Parked the car, went back to the hay bale, cut the twine and opened the bale for the donkeys. Jenny buried her nose in it. I think she'd eaten baled hay where she lived before. She played with it, loosening it with her dexterous lips, ripping out a mouthful to chew on, chewing it like I'd made her day with a box of chocolates, and it was good hay too. I watched her taste it with her first nibbles, assessing the flavor. A smile came to her face and she picked up another swatch and started chewing. Jack acted like this might have been his first hay bale. He may have eaten from round bales before. He approached the hay with some hesitation, needing to check it out. He saw Jenny chewing on it and he pulled out some to chew. He seemed to be discovering the dried grass, unsure how he was going to like it, and it turned out he liked it. I covered the ground in the shed with hay for them to lie down on through cold winter nights and when the weather is bad. I know they like the ground, but I thought a little insulation might help keep the ground from being so cold. They might decide to eat it. They're welcome to it.  

 

donkey jen

 

 

*

GADDAFI GOES DOWN

            franz marc, blue horse II


Today has been sleep day. Had 2 naps and could go back to sleep now, not awake an hour from last nap. It seems like a week or two of going like usual, then one day I want to sleep all day. In this time of the life I can allow that. I think I've always had that inclination; it's that now I have the flexibility to follow my own rhythm instead the 9-5, M-F rhythm of schedules, which isn't a rhythm at all. It's a calendar with appointment times and dates. Pixels. On the radio news they're talking about pollution permits. Earlier, I was looking at some Remi Gaillard videos on YouTube. I've seen several by now, and some several times. They are moments of absurdity. Then I hear about pollution permits like it's something serious.



And the day's big news: the death of Lybia's Gaddafi. American wars are great geography lessons. This recent attention on Lybia taught me how to spell it. I thought the Y and I were the other way around. Iraq. Who ever heard of Iraq before American might smashed it? Who ever heard of Vietnam before American force invaded? Where can we go next that nobody's heard of? Maybe Togo or Namibia or Zambia. First thing I heard this morning about Gaddafi was somebody saying he, Gaddafi, called the resistance rats, and they found him in hiding in a culvert, "like a rat." Careful what you say. It will come back and bite you in the ass. I read that when they were apprehended, his body guard shot him in the chest, but it didn't kill him immediately. He bled for about half an hour and expired. I found short video on YouTube of him dead from AlJazeera. I think I was 354 to see it, meaning it had only been up a few minutes. By now it's probably several thousand and will soon be over a million. I saw the illicit video of the Saddam hanging too.



I felt for Gaddafi, everything he'd dished out coming back on him in a brief period of time; hate shooting bullets and missiles at him. He'd evidently become so insulated from the world everybody else lived in by his own kingdom. He was something of an Ottoman ruler, gone insane from generations of in-breeding in their case, him gone insane from surrounding himself by flatterers. Shakespeare could have made a good story of it. His secret longing for Condi Rice came to the surface when they raided his house. He created a Disneyworld for himself that one day turned upside down. I heard people saying they wished he'd lived so he could stand trial. That wouldn't happen. Milosevic made very boring news in his time of trial. Then he died. Gaddafi had the good fortune not to have to live in perhaps a prison cell, watched round the clock, and publicly humiliated as long as he lives. His body guard did the right thing. The mob that caught him would have killed him if his body guard hadn't already.



It's kind of like the death of Michael Jackson. What's next? Up there with tsunami on an island you've never heard of. What's next? Assassination of a judge in Belarus. What's next? I have to say it's an enjoyment to hear something on the news besides suicide bombs in Kandahar. From the Middle East to North Africa, Afghanistan to Lybia. All of it killing. If it bleeds, it leads. There is no telling how many different versions of the story of the death of Gaddafi are going around the world reported by different reporters, all of them racing to get the story to their employers first. Leave it to historians to sort out what really happened from all the different accounts. The account I mentioned of his body guard shooting him was just the first thing I heard. Tomorrow it will be something else, then something else and then we'll never hear about it again. Lybia can only be a better place now, if a civil war doesn't come next.



The fun part about the news is there is no telling what will come up next. It's a "crapshoot." That perhaps has a great deal to do with why the news makes an evening soap opera that keeps us coming back to see what happens next. It's an every day mystery. How many dead today? I wasn't cranked up about Gaddafi inside like the issue was something important. But I have to confess when I saw the headline that he was dead, I felt relief, like that's finally over, sort of. It's a very important day in the history of Lybia. We don't know if Lybia will be better or worse off after this. Like was it better to get rid of Saddam and destroy Iraq because the people don't like American occupation? Iraq is not better off after Saddam. It's yet to be seen what happens in Lybia. I'd like to see it thrive and become the vacation capital of North Africa.



The news on the hour is happening. I heard a version of his killing entirely different from the one this morning. This time, his captors were driving him away in a car and there was a firefight and he was hit in the head. Ho hum. His body guard shooting him to save him from capture makes more sense than shot in a car in a firefight. From now on, it will be like that radio comedy show on the weekends, Wadayaknow? I think it is. They ask someone to pick a true news story from two others that are made up. When you have nothing to go by but the story in a few sentences, it's a challenge. By Sunday morning it will be a challenge to sort out which story of the killing of Gaddafi is true. The funny part is there won't be an answer.



*

THE DANCING FLAME

by Ida Kohlmeyer

Someone talking on radio news today mentioned something about "consumer spending." I'm really tired of being labelled a consumer, like that's what I do in life, consume. I buy a cd, I'm consuming it. I buy gas, I'm consuming it. I pay electric bill, I'm consuming it. I read a book, I'm consuming it. Eating it. Or I am a fire burning it. But, it sounds good and it covers everybody, politically correct neutral. It's struck me odd for years to be regarded a consumer. A long time ago it was citizen. Now, it's consumer and sometimes taxpayer. A government employee gets caught with porn in his computer at work and he's accused of thinking dirty at taxpayer expense. Punish him! We could be called voters, but that only applies to about half the people.



Then, there is the news in relation to what we call reality. I listen to the news for years and a city like New York becomes a hell-hole to stay as far away from as possible. Go to New York and it is entirely different. You don't see people getting killed everywhere you turn. Gang violence is in the black parts of the city, and sensible white people stay out. For one thing, sensible white people know they're not welcome. Nobody has ever mugged me or picked my pocket in New York. I've had several attempts at pocket picking in London. I was in the crowd seeing Hirohito ride in a fancy carriage with the Queen. I felt hands feeling me up the whole time. Somebody passing through the crowd slowly. I knew better than to carry money and passport in pants pockets. I wore a jacket with interior pockets and stood with my arms folded. It felt like I was in a Dickens novel.



Every time I go to a city, I'm impressed by how not like the news it is. Nobody sticks a gun in the side window of my car, tells me to get out and takes the car. If it happens, and surely it does, it doesn't happen to everybody all the time. I tend to listen to the news quite a lot, albeit with about half attention, like 5 minutes after 5 minutes of news I don't remember any of it unless reminded. I've heard the headline news half a dozen times today and if you'd ask me what's happening on the news I couldn't give an accurate answer. A Kingston Trio song from the late 50s comes to mind, They're rioting in Africa, there's strife in Iran. That was half a century ago. Has it changed? Yes. There's more of it. I fill my head with Syrian protesters getting killed by government troops. I tell myself not to listen. Then I wonder about the people in the protest groups getting shot at. I wonder about the troops shooting them. I feel like they deserve at least attention. Then I laugh at myself, but not whole-heartedly.



It's funny how people mass together for security, then the enemy comes from within--crime from the people shut out of society, shut out from even making a decent living in a culture of white people jealously guarding the purity of their precious race. This is what I see the republicans reacting against, the recent fact that people of color in America now are half the population. Republican is now the racist party that the Democrat used to be. Of course they deny it, like the Democrats denied it then. They're Americans. Deny is what we do. But you look around and it's everywhere all over the globe. It appears to me that everything that is coming due around the world at the same time is the stuff swept under the metaphorical rug. Evidently the rug has been raised and all the piles of issues settled by denial are exposed.



The news makes me want to stay home and spend the least amount of money possible. It makes me want to stay out of everybody else's way, because we're in a dangerous time in a dangerous world. Not in Sparta. There is plenty of testosterone posturing in Sparta, but it's harmless as the sound of a mouse skittering across a linoleum floor. I have to remind myself that much of what's on the news is posturing for the sake of getting on the news. Unfortunately, The News is the only "voice" that is heard. Some bunch of people have an agenda and want the world to see their point of view, they do something to get on the news. It has to be horrendous, because that's all the news sees. The only good news I've heard in the last week is Rupert Murdoch sits on the hot seat in court for excesses against the interest of humanity.



Yet, I can see it quite another way. Because I pay attention to the news, avoiding corporate news as much as I can, I find I have an understanding of that mental sphere we share collectively. Of course, my understanding is my own, just like everyone else's is their own. A man in the coffee shop who talks down about liberals and wants to nuke the entire Arab world hears the same news I hear. He gets his from different sources. He prefers Fox news, I prefer NPR. They both tell the same stories, more or less. One with rant, the other with emphasis. The continuum of the news feeds into and modifies our mental "world view" from one hearing to the next. I have in my head these understandings according to the mental sphere only. The mental construct each of us has in our heads regarding the world of the news is our own. It's like paying attention to the weather used to be. The news changes like the weather, like the flame in a fireplace. I've an idea that's what makes it so interesting.



*

TURNING IT OFF

scott freeman layin it to it

When my mind has been functioning today it has been puzzled by the dive civilization is taking. In my earlier years, college years, last half of the 60s, when I was becoming aware of civilization, it seemed like there was a bit of hope possible then, that we're improving, becoming a more humane society. What I didn't know then, and I suspect many others didn't either, was the momentum of nation building had come to a halt in the time of the Kennedy assassination and we didn't feel it yet. By now we're seeing and feeling what followed, and I don't feel any hope for civilization and can't say I know anybody that does. Surely some do, but I don't know where. It would have to be pre-school. The upper-case Bank (corporate takeover of all the world's governments) might fulfill the prophecy of what's to follow global business and government.

It feels to me like we went over the top in our collective American wheel of fortune. Fortune got better and better with us. We were at the top of the wheel about the time of the Kennedy assassination. From then on it's been downhill and since 1980 it's been a downhill run. This is why I don't believe a recovery from this "recession" is on its way. It's more like the beginning of a gradual decline that becomes steeper and steeper. I used to think Obama might turn us away from the momentum of the last half century, but don't see that anymore. Like Ralph Nader gave as his reasoning for consciously taking votes away from Gore in Bush's favor, he said the Republicans will get us "there" faster. There, I take to mean to the breaking point when our government turns away from the people and the people see the need to rise up. Though with all the divisive propaganda we've been receiving for the last 30 years that's been working, we're most likely to rise up in civil war, one bunch of ideologues against another.

My solution is to forget thinking any good will come from our government to the American people from this point on. I used to believe our government had our best interest at heart, and have seen throughout my lifetime it's true, if you're a corporation. If I can get it out of my head that keeping up with what they're doing in Washington DC this year is about the same as reading about any year picked from the past, 1813, I'd maybe read more history. It's only aggravation I feel thinking about those people I believe to be traitors, in that they say I'll do this for you to get your vote, then when they've got it, never heard of you. What'd you say your name was? Remember elections in high school? Suddenly whoever is running for election is glad to see you suddenly after never seeing you before. A guy I went to school with in Charleston had business ambition and political. When he was doing very well in his business a state politician took him for a huge amount of money, lost the election, no money to pay you back with. Sorry. His health broke down and he died not long after. Betrayal. That's why I don't honor politicians. Part of why. Every one of them meets the description of John Lennon's song, Nowhere Man, esp Lyndon Johnson who was president at the time of the song, lying us into the war in Vietnam and everything else. I was glad to see him go out in disgrace. One of those moments where Justice seems to work.

The news is good entertainment, nonetheless. The soap opera for men. Daytime soaps advertise washing machine detergent. The story line goes nothin aint never right, ever-things always bad as it can get. Evening soaps advertise soap for shaving. Tune in tomorrow and see more action of US troops bullying the poor people of the world, System Of A Down pounding in their headphones patrolling with machine guns. We're Number One. Numero Uno in case you don't know English. On NPR it's the same without the slide show of a few seconds of action shots, a tank shooting its big gun, moslems praying, homes broken into at night by troops with flashlights on their guns, barking in English, a useless language except for tone of voice and body language. We get a chamber pot full of propaganda in the face telling us it is necessary for our "freedom" to destroy what's left of a helpless country, then leave with a chip on the shoulder saying clean up your own mess. It's your fault. I can hear that mess now and laugh at it. Because I can't change the course of anything beyond myself.

I get brief lectures from people who want me to believe I can change things. Look at biographies of people who changed big things with an idea. I don't care enough to spend the rest of my life in court. Cindy Sheehan is still beating her head against a concrete wall. I prefer to stay at home and paint, write to you, listen to good music and watch good movies. I don't have a lot of time left any way you look at it, and see no reason to spend my later years in aggravation over what a bunch of certified frauds are doing and claiming it's for my benefit. I'll stay at home, tune them out, watch movies, read good books, and practice allowing--allowing all others to do whatever suits them to do and allowing myself the same. I'll practice living like the Bible recommends, giving no importance to the temporal. I kind of tend that way anyway. Now is a good time to take it further, get closer to it. Still, it hurts to lose a friend and a pet.