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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