THE OUTSIDER

grace hartigan

It has been a daily blessing since I clicked the power button *off* to my mental interest in following political nonsense. Simultaneous with turning off that interest came the facebook group, The Daily Creative Practice, brief conversations by way of comment boxes and photographs of varieties of works of art shared, the ones that want to, showing something new. It has brought me new friends, people I'm happy to know and communicate with almost daily. We tap into each other's aesthetic. One, Lee, I feel like we've known each other in lifetimes past. I appreciate about the group that nobody is promoting a given point of view. No games. I was gaping out the window a moment ago at a dove pecking around among last year's pine needle's on the ground, fixed momentarily on the subtle haze of pink on their gray-brown donkey color I can't find a name for. A red squirrel charged in from the right, straight to the dove from behind. The dove fluttered and twittered into space, the squirrel ran to the tree in front of the window, ran around the trunk, then out of sight. Now it is back at the place where it chased off the dove. The squirrel had been seed-hunting there before. A small black and white woodpecker is going over the bark of the white pine out another window. There came a day that I realized how truly ignorant our politicians are. They don't even try to cover up anymore. It's straight up they're in it for the money, they lick the hands that feed them. I asked myself why I was paying so much attention to ignorant people. A waste of my own mental time and space.

 

grace hartigan

 

The Daily Creative Practice has taken the space left over by the sudden vacancy of  my dim-witted drift through the mind-space of below average people. Pay more attention to the books I want to read, the art I want to make, the people I want to interact with. Pull back from media-fed mind to the world of people I live among, the people I care about who care about me. Eliminate the static of media nonsense from my own interior motion picture collage of mind. I want less of that belief system, less of that tone of voice in my head, less of that mind. It's been well over a month since I've paid attention to the vanity of self-centered men on the take. I see a picture of weeping Boner and it makes me laugh like seeing a cartoon, a 2D caricature of complicity with corporate greed. I used to react with a feeling of GAK in my belly. I don't value somebody of that mind, so why pay attention to him even to be disgusted by his Xtreme shamelessness? Why even laugh at cartoons about him? Our political system has become something I cannot support with my attention. I'm considering not participating in the vote later this year as a way of unplugging myself from the corporate media belief system that money is the only purpose. Much as I'd like to feel support for Obama because the racists hate him so much, I can't help but see him a corporate plant. I don't mean a rubber tree. The black people caught on early that he was not with them. He talks to them the way white men talk to them; you needta, you oughta, you better, you should. His white supporters are catching on gradually he's not there for them either.

grace hartigan

My new friends at DCP are a million times more interesting than Machinegun Barbie. At DCP, we have Paleontologist Barbie. I have also learned not to comment on memes I get from places I'd clicked Like on in the past. I got into a brief exchange with a guy involved with Occupy, and he was one hard core activist, the kind that ends up in a deep dark dungeon a political prisoner. Just his attitude made me shudder. It was a friendly exchange. I didn't know what to say. I seem far left in relation to the republican party, but when I have a glimpse of somebody far left, it throws me way back to center. In the face of the two extremes, I'm neither one. I could call myself of the right because I believe the people making ridiculous noise about guns have a right. I don't have a gun, don't want one. Somebody from the apparent "left" gave me all kinds of hell for using the "cruel word," redneck, "you know better," dotted with yellow smiley faces. It threw my mind to kindergarten and refrigerator magnets. I want nothing more to do with the left. I wrote back, "I AM a redneck and proud of it." Unliked the place. Lord have mercy, now I can't even say redneck. Two days ago I saw a thing saying it's not all right for white people to use the enword. I wrote back, "Can I say white emeffer?" I've become a little bit confrontational with those people. I've found some who promote tolerance are as judgmental and intolerant as the most adamantine baptist preacher. The very most intolerant person I know had a sticker on the back window of his car that said Tolerance, and called himself a Buddhist. I figured the sticker on his back window was there to remind himself--albeit in reverse, thinking he's telling everybody else. I seldom let any of them get away with their judgmental statements about the South.

grace hartigan

The liberals who want me tolerant of everything and everybody are severely intolerant of the South. They give more evidence that people outside the South have no idea about the South. I remind them the slavery they're pointing the finger at the South over has been gone over a century and a half, while in American coastal cities is more slavery going on than there ever was in the South. Only difference, the slavery now is Asian, and Asian's aren't cool to wax self-righteous over this year. It's still ok to say the A-word. And the Asian mob, the noise-makers intuit not to provoke that beast. Benign Southern people living in poverty in a trailer by the side of the road, a confederate flag in the bedroom window, did not have slaves, do not have slaves and never seen no damn slave in their life. The only thing the flag means is they drink beer, love the South, and just to be spiteful embrace everything Yankees judge wrong with the South. The South they love is the Lynard Skynard and Allman Brothers South. Southern rock! Hail Yeah! That's something else outsiders don't know about Southern rednecks; they embrace everything Yankees say is wrong with them, because Yankees don't like it. It's comedy. It's I-am-I humor. When I wrote back to the person on facebook saying I am a redneck, it was in place of saying, "Y'all sure are a judgmental bunch." I reminded myself of a saying learned from an aunt, Don't start it if you don't want it started. It's time to pull my mind out of that kind of thinking too. I'll be Unliking some more of them. I will kick into gear an attitude that I like people outside the South looking down on us--it keeps them away. I tell myself, don't educate them, let them believe the highway patrol south of the Mason-Dixon line pulls over every car they see with a Yankee tag. I must let go of my own intolerance of intolerance of intolerance.

grace hartigan herself

 

 

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TOLERANCE INTOLERANCE

silent sign by tj worthington


Again, ongoing problems with website. I write a sentence and the computer locks. I wait and wait, it starts again, I write a sentence and computer freezes again. I've learned that when it happens to stop and not force myself against it, because it turns into a cussing frenzy and makes me crazy. The only reason I've got this far is that it has stopped. When it starts I click on "send feedback" and tell the anonymous entity that sees the feedback the "interface" is not working again. Anonymous Entity never responds to questions. Wait a few hours and it's ok. I get so tired of that I think of letting this project go. I see in a baby a year and a half old a humorous version of my own behavior. She cannot figure something out, like screwing a cap onto a bottle, she tries until she sees she can't do it, puts it down and the thing is no longer of interest to her. She goes off to something else. That's how I do. It takes all my self-will to continue. Attempted to start writing a few minutes ago. I decided to go take a nap. Attempted it again after just a few minutes and it worked this time. Whatever.

An hour or so ago I saw an interview somebody had put on facebook of Colin Powell with Bill O'Reilly. I couldn't watch it all. Again, Powell was the easy target setting himself up for republican refudiation of his credibility pointing at his negritude on the air. Powell called O'Reilly on calling him an African American all the time. It didn't faze O'Reilly. Fact is, Powell is Jamaican by birth. Maybe he's an African Jamaican, or a Jamaican American, or in Powell's way of seeing it, an American. That won't do, however. It's not divisive enough. It doesn't separate him from the white audience. Of course, O'Reilly is seeing a nigger and Powell is playing through it. Sometimes I go to these odd videos from Faux News for comedy, to hear yo-yos O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck, Coulter, Ingraham, and almost always turn it off before it's a third of the way into it. It is not easy for me to listen to that mind. It's not even glossed over. It's plain stupid. I wonder about what kind of morons they are. It doesn't seem rational to me that people would have a talking head job on tv and take such pride in ignorance and deception.I didn't realize such ignorant people could keep high-profile well-paying jobs. Sarah Palin, not the dumbest of them all, was put aside. This guy Paul Rand is showing himself to be a Sarah Palin wannabe. He's really bad off. It comes out his mouth every time he speaks. Like saying to Hilary Clinton at the "hearing," "if I were president, I'd fire you." I saw a clever meme on facebook that captioned Hilary saying, "I stopped listening when you said, if you were president."

I have a problem with calling people stupid and the frequency of its use in the time of online chat and name calling in comment boxes. In the first several times of my problems with the blogger website, I'd click on send feedback and wallow in the freedom to let whoever was reading feedback have it. Finally, I caught on that it was somebody at the other end doing the best that can be done attempting to take the kinks out of the program and make it a better experience instead of worse. I fell into that tendency with a computer to regard the anonymous person at the other end an asshole, moron, stupid, idiot, dork, words that are the most popular on the internet. I've stopped myself from using those words, except where there is no other word. I've come to see the use of these words an invalid attitude toward the unknown other. Of course, the reason the words are so abundant online is you don't know the person at the other end, both ways. Nobody is going to knock on your door and when you open it kick your ass. This is what we become when there are no repercussions to our actions. It's nothing to be proud of, but many are.

I've never heard conservatives define conservatism in a manner that satisfied me, nor have I heard any self-definition by liberals that satisfies what I see. I've finally found that both can be broken down to tolerance. The conservative agenda has to do with intolerance. The liberal agenda has to do with tolerance. Faux News is nothing but intolerance spewing round the clock. Intolerance is for all except ignorant white men. I suppose it is a good thing to have Faux News because it brings out the ignorance in the American white man belief system. White man has presented himself before as rational thinking and in charge. Since Limbaugh, you want to find out what white men are thinking, listen to him. He's paid $4,000,000 a year to be the voice of the white man. Before Limbaugh, these people did not have a voice. Now that they do have a voice, I'd like them to shut up. I'm glad I never fell for the comfort of ignorance among white men. This is only one of many reasons I embrace my self-created Outsider status.

I'm recalling someone I once knew who kept a sticker on his car's rear window that said TOLERANCE. I had to laugh every time I saw it. This is the most intolerant individual I have known. All I could figure was he put it there to remind himself of tolerance since he had so little. He was very tolerant where the latest cool thing to be tolerant about was somebody else's race or sexuality, indignantly tolerant. It's very close to indignant piety. The sticker's colors faded, it dried and curled up. Eventually it fell off after several years. Every time I saw it was a reminder of his intolerance. That he's tolerant of black people and gay people, doesn't mean he's tolerant of the people around him. They're just ideas. I've not found that he likes anyone in his world, that being the people of the county and the American people. He thinks of them like he thinks of me, too ignorant to bother with. After blowing his mind with LSD in the Sixties, he spends his life in superiority to everyone around him. He only looks down on others from way high up where you can see the curve of the earth. Not one is good enough to rate his attention. His wives have moved in, freaked out, and left, like frogs dropped into boiling water. After 30+ years of knowing him, I never saw his superiority bear out. It comes down to he is himself and everyone else is not. So he's got the goods on everybody.

Hearing him harangue on the ignorance of the people of this county left my mouth hanging open. He has lived here as long as I have. I don't see the mountain people like that at all. I've found the mountain people so incredibly intelligent they humble whatever intelligence I may have. The time he told me of his contempt for the mountain people, I wanted to say something to give him a new way to look at the people around him, but realized this was an expression of his attitude toward life, just like his absence of tolerance was his attitude toward life, as well. When I look at his intolerance of all but self, it bespeaks an ego so profound, evidently so overwhelming to him he worships it. He loves his ego. He's the only one that knows anything, wherever his, whoever he's among. He's always right and everybody else is always wrong. He told me he can only tolerate being among these ignorant mountain people nine months of the year, has to get away for three months to another part of the world where the people are not as ignorant as here. My tolerance of him dried up and fell away like the sticker on his car.

I've not seen him in over a year and don't want to see him or hear his voice again. I don't appreciate the people I know to be true human beings held for ignorant, incompetent and stupid. Those are words I'd use on him, but not any others I live among. I've tried for years to tolerate him, but a year ago something inside snapped. That day he was being especially contrarian at lunch and I called him on it. He got up and walked away and I thought: Wow! That was easy! I could have done that years ago! After a year of his absence from my life, it makes me joyous to think of the span of time getting longer every day. He'll never call me again and I'll never call him. In the past I had enjoyed his three month absences. It was never good to see him again. I've not seen his car in town so I'm guessing he's gone away to someplace in the rest of the world where he accords everybody there his intellectual equal. I've never let on, but I don't see his intellect anything to crow about, let alone be proud of. What he calls his intellect I call his ego. I don't even like to use his name anymore. I asked him once, just to be a bitch, if he put that sticker on his car window to remind himself of tolerance. No. He doesn't believe there is enough tolerance in the world. There's certainly none in his world.


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TOLERANCE

cosmic chagall #2


The word tolerance has been in my head quite a lot yesterday and today. It started when a Republican friend asked what I was reading. I told him Obama's Audacity of Hope. Friend rolled his eyes, inwardly to himself, not as an aggressive gesture to piss me off. I already knew we were poles apart politically. When men are together talking politics I tend to let them talk, and I listen, because I love to hear what they have to say when it opposes my own point of view, within reason, not going so far as to pay attention to Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich's talking piglet.



My response to the subtle rolling of the eyes, or look inward, was to say, 'He's a brilliant man.' First thought was to say mind, but I wanted to emphasize that I respect him as a man, not just a mind. In McCain country, I'm not ashamed of respecting the kind of intelligence that got a kid through college and law school at Harvard on scholarships he earned by himself. I can't help but respect that kind of intelligence. I couldn't do it. He has a wife of equal intelligence.



What I've been looking at as an adult with some political awareness, living among people who think very differently from the way I think, is the tolerance between us isn't even tolerance. Too strong a word. I can't say I tolerate them, because tolerate implies something objectionable, like the dingings and buzzes cars make to let you know you opened the door or haven't fastened the seat belt. That's tolerance. My friends who think differently from how I think politically is like nothing. I like the people I like for a whole lot more reasons than agreeing with me or seeing as I see. We're not made like that. We're individuals with free will, even when we don't want to be.



If any two people in America would name their 10 favorite songs the same, it would only be by random chance, one in Utah, the other in Massachusetts, and they never heard of each other. I don't know about identical twins. The fact is, if I ever met someone who thinks exactly as I think, I probably wouldn't like that person. We tend not to care much for the people most like us. Like you need to meet so and so--you have so much in common, seldom works out. It tends to make me wonder what the person who said it believes about me. That's where I end the thinking on the matter, because that's where it jumps off into the inexplicable, the never to be known, the best not to know.



I'm sure it is tolerance for many to have a black man in the White House, like it is tolerance for many to have a white man in the White House. I'd say most of the white men I know believe Rush Limbaugh has something to say worth hearing, when I see him a propagandist and nothing else. He was the mouthpiece for the Gingrich Revolution, aka Reagan Revolution, the white man's last stand. He's still making noise, in William Faulkner's words, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.



Three times I spent a few hours in a car with someone listening to Limbaugh and never protested once. That's tolerance. Except when Limbaugh said, 'anyone sleeping at this hour of the day [11am] is a pervert.' I commented out loud, 'What about people working the night shift? I'm surprised he didn't say pree-vert.' No response. The driver was practicing tolerance, too, letting me get away with making a rational point and him not telling me I'm an idiot.



But on the whole, my friends and acquaintances disagree politically with, I agree with in a lot of other ways. Some of my best friends are Republicans. I find it funny that among the people I like best, the majority are Republicans, pre-Reagan Republicans. Reagan Republicans I have a difficult time tolerating and they have an equally rough time with an unrepentant liberal. We just don't talk about it. We know to stay off the subject of politics and practice it very well. They think I'm a 'Big Democrat,' when the fact is I'm an Anti-Republican.



It actually galled me to have to vote for Gore. I'd have preferred to give my vote to Ralph Nader, but the Bush 2 threat was too strong. Of course, they lost in every way it can be figured and took it anyway. But that's history. They took the arrogance white skin to the absurd extreme. It wasn't just the people of color and white women that put a stop to it. A lot of white men voted for him too. Not all white men take Limbaugh for a brilliant mind, or even an average mind.



Since the years of politics by the Gingrich method of divide and conquer, Democrats and Republicans continue to speak and be friends. In America before Gingrich, there was actually more tolerance than after. Reagan only won by 1% of the vote. But since the power in the American people said enough to division, intolerance, taking from the workers, giving to the rich, and keeping-the-niggers-down; now the Limbaugh (Gingrich) message, kill the monkey.



What I see is the American people want tolerance, even Republicans do. The attempt to do away with tolerance turned back like a boomerang and struck the sender. I like having a President not ruled by denial, which turns out, it seems, to be a white thing. Black people have never had the privileges that bring about denial. The black people know that when we say racism is over, it isn't so. Jews have known It can happen here. But it is our particular American tolerance that ultimately wins despite setbacks along the way, such that though It came close, It did not happen here. A black President is evidence American racism is weakening considerably.



I did not like the Nixon-Reagan-Bush years eating away at our civil liberties like piranhas on a Big Mac. It was worth it, however, to see the American people come together and say, Nevermore. That's not us. We already had a Civil War. We don't want another one.



A friend who recently moved to the mountains of rural California from Atlanta, said of American racism last time we talked on the phone, the South likes the people, not the race. The north likes the race, not the people. He said the Northern way is the California way. Of the two, he prefers the Southern way. I'd have to say the same. How many times I've heard in my life, he aint no nigger, he's a black man. I'd like it to be such that we're all just folks, skin color an identity like fingerprints. Everybody is fine with we all have different fingerprints, so what's the big deal about the shade of pigment in our skin? Since it's not that way in the world at large, I can have it that way in myself by living what I believe.