OCCUPYING CAPITALISM

       straight lines

Going into this winter has been a mild approach. It's almost Christmas and yesterday was in the 60s and today is predicted to be the same, plus rain. After the rain, a wave of cold will come in. I like the mild temperatures, because the house uses less heat. It almost makes me miss the years of gathering firewood in the fall, carrying wood to the house a few times a day, keeping the fire going. Now I use a kerosene Monitor. Kerosene costs more than gasoline, and it used to cost less, before so many people started needing it for heat. I can't help but be interested in changes going on in the Occupy movement. It's a classic American situation where a large group of people under one form of oppression or another are making a demonstration to draw attention to an imbalance that needs balancing. They are always ignored, beaten with clubs, handcuffed, treated like maximum security prisoners, taken to jail to get fingerprinted and entered into the computers, treated like criminals all the way around. Like in the Rolling Stones song, "Think I'll go down to the demonstration, get my fair share of abuse." It happens over and over, so much it's ongoing.



The part that interests me about the Occupy movement is it looks like the beginnings of the end of Capitalism. We're at a place in historical sequence of events that looks like it is time for Capitalism to implode of its own excesses, as Karl Marx saw it a century and a half ago. If we're to have a thousand years of peace, as the Bible prophecies foretell, we can't have peace in Capitalism. It's not possible. The word communism has been ruined by the Russians and Chinese, whose regimes are not communist. True communism follows the imploding of capitalism. It's what comes after capitalism in the natural social evolution. I just now had a good laugh at all these loaded words I'm using in one paragraph; communism, evolution, Karl Marx. Each one of them makes the average American shudder, because nobody ever uses them. They are the forbidden words. To say evolution is every bit as reprehensible as saying pussy. It's not that anybody knows the meanings of these words, just that they're the words it's against the rules to use. Bad. Not good.



In Victor Hugo's story, Les Miserables, on film the Liam Neeson version directed by Bille August, the man wearing black, obsessed with destroying the Neeson character's life, at the end admitted he never broke a rule, and fell backwards into the river after handcuffing himself. The man of the straight and narrow, law and order, the one who dots his i's and crosses his t's, enforcer of the rules, stood in opposition to a Jesus kind of character, Jean Valjean, who helped the poor and did not pass judgment. The man in the black cloak represented the forces of civilization that demand our attention and take our life away from us, like the vampires popular on tv today. He leaves us to die of pneumonia in the cold and wet, makes us into zombies, the living dead. One of Hugo's great themes in this story was really a look at ourselves as Christian people, such that when somebody exhibits Christian behavior, he becomes an outcast. Christ-like behavior might work for awhile in a rural community, but not in an urban setting, unless hidden.



The difficult part of living under Capitalism is that it's god is Mammon, a god indifferent to human beings except as expendable commodities. It's only interest is money. The USA is not a Christian nation at all, but Mammonite. Everybody wants more money. Everybody wants to be successful in the money game. Everybody wants to win the lottery. Everybody wants to live high on the hog. Nobody wants to help the poor. It's their fault they're poor. Fuck em. Get a job. Capitalism was the same in 19th Century Paris as it is in USA today. Your money or your life. Money is power, money is beauty, money is sexy, money is important, money is existence. Isn't there something that runs through all scriptures about putting your faith in false gods? The United States of America doesn't act like Mammon is a false god. The television evangelists certainly don't act like it.



I can't help but imagine the worst watching Capitalism implode of its own excesses. The excesses have come to the point that "we the people" are without hope, a mountain of debt on your back for an education that will get you a minimum wage job at Home Depot. Just another brick in the wall. What I see next is how the American people take to corporate indifference going after that last drop of blood, the last fish in the sea. Even though the history we get in school has little relation to what really happened, all Americans have revolution taught to us even if we didn't watch tv. Our government is so quickly becoming our enemy, by regarding us the enemy first, that it unsettles me to imagine where this is going. And we're going so fast in that direction, it won't be long getting here, wherever it is. Hate is boiling up like crazy on the side of the Right Wing, the flames fanned by the Windbag of the Airwaves and the like, in memory of the Gypper. I pray that the transition be gentle.

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NORWAY AND MAX MANUS THE MOVIE

       

         edvard munch

It's Christmas present buying time again. Money flies away anyway, but this time of year it disappears like stinger missiles. I'm out of money and have more presents to buy. Not a lot, but a lot is the same as a little. Any is more than I can handle. A half hour at amazon.com and I'm done in. Won't gain any weight this month. Won't lose any either. I'd like to buy presents for everybody I know, but can only handle a few.

Watched a Norwegian film today, MAX MANUS, the story of Norwegian resistance in Oslo during the Nazi occupation. It was historical, Max Manus the name of the hero of the resistance effort in Norway. I knew nothing at all of the Norwegian experience during WW2. I suppose if I think about it, I'll remember hearing about U-boats hiding in Norwegian fjords, but no more than that. I've been learning about Scandinavia seeing movies, looking at maps in the Atlas, seeing landscape and cities, seeing the people, hearing the languages. Max Manus began his war effort fighting Russians in Finland. Back in Oslo, he once said he would like to go back to Finland, because there it was clear cut; in Norway you didn't know who was with the Germans and who was not. Everyone you knew was a potential for turning you in.

He became a national hero quite inadvertently, as I suppose all heroes are founded, didn't see himself any greater than the guys he worked with who were dead. Toward the end he was talking with a German officer, who was locked up on war crimes charges, the German asked him how he managed never to be caught. He said he was lucky. The German said he didn't believe in luck. Manus shrugged it off. What else could he say? We got a brief look into his memory in several split-second shots of moments when a guy he was with was killed, which could have been him. It was flipping a coin. What else could he call it when he could have been shot many times, was hit a few times and survived? He didn't see he was a hero for surviving. He felt like he should have been dead with his friends that didn't make it. He'd found his talent. The war over, he didn't know what to do. All he'd ever done was be a soldier.

A couple of times, escaping arrest, he would go to Sweden on cross-country skis. He was fluent in all three languages, knew English and evidently German, too. At the end of the war he was honored by the king in a parade it looked like everyone in Norway went to. Manus sat in the front seat of the king's Rolls, the king and his wife in the back seat. The camera held on Manus's face for a long time as the people on both sides of the street were thick and all waving Norwegian flags, all cheering for him. In the beginning of the parade, his face was like he was looking for the cat hole, the way out of there. He was not comfortable. He was not a hero. It was not him they were cheering, but his friends who died. His face was pained. After a long while between two rows of his country's people waving the home flag that had been his inspiration, his face softened, his eyes lit up a little bit and the beginnings of a smile appeared on his face. The End. He got it. His efforts, his stress, his agony, his fear had prevailed. He accomplished what he set out to do. Maybe it wasn't so bad to survive it, after all. 

Edvard Munch was from Norway, the painter who made the Scream and a large number of beautiful paintings with powerful feeling, a brief poem of a story. A 4-hour documentary of Munch's life used to be available at netflix a year ago, but isn't now. I wanted to see it again. At amazon it's more than $40 and I'm not paying that to see it one time. As a documentary of Munch's life, it carries the same feeling that is in his paintings, that came from within Munch, himself. Maybe 5 years ago the art museum in Oslo was hit for two Munch paintings, the primary ones, the Scream and the Madonna. What a shock it was for something like that to happen in Oslo. Oslo never gets in the news. Anyway, that's how it used to be. Then the crazy fascist killed sixty-some children of liberal parents, weeding out the next generation of liberals. He tested the Norwegian penal system to the max. If I remember correctly, and I don't, twenty-one years is the maximum sentence. Then you get this guy who needs to be put out of sight of the sun forever, looking at 21 years. I imagine they've found a way to deal with his sentence. I'd say he rates out of the ordinary sentencing like his crime was out of the ordinary. It's not my call. I'm glad I don't have it to make.

I have an inner longing for my next lifetime to be somewhere in Scandinavia. I'm thinking I would like a lifetime in a country with a sane government. Seems to me those five governments are the sanest in the world. Living in any country is living under a government. China is a bit too much like the USA for me to want to turn up there next time. I'd like to live someplace where their only tradition in war is actual self-defence in landscape nobody else wants. Oslo, Stockholm and Helsinki are about the same latitude as Fairbanks, Alaska. They have long nights and long days and long winters, long, long winters. Short summers. But when it's all you've ever known, it's home. All of Norway is mountains. The northern two-thirds of Sweden is mountains. Finland looks like Piedmont from south to north, east to west. Countless lakes in Finland. Big lakes. Big lakes in Sweden too. Big lakes in Norway, long lakes like very wide river. In Norway the highways run alongside lakes and rivers everywhere all over the country. I look at the topographical map and marvel at how wonderful it would be to drive some of those highways in the summer. Norwegians don't strike me foolish enough to fish their lakes and rivers to extinctions. Scandinavians in general seem to me sensible people. The ones I've known have been. 

It would be funny to grow up in Stockholm in the same kind of fundamentalist spirit I grew up in Kansas locked into, asking what crimes against humanity had I committed in past lifetimes to warrant growing up in a Kansas fundamentalist church. Wouldn't that be irony of ironies. The Finnish language fascinates me. It is so radically different from the others. Possibly people living there feel like they are the backwaters of the world. Maybe that is what appeals to me about a place like Helsinki. St Petersburg a short voyage by ferry or plane, the same as to anyplace. Denmark would be a nice place to live. All these countries are mostly country people in little villages sprinkled all over the land with roads between them. This may have something to do with why these nationalities seem like such sensible people to me. Maybe they have their feet in their roots all the time. That sounds a little too idealized. More than likely they're people like people other places, people with their own cultures, their own belief systems, their political preferences.    

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NPR IS NOT LIBERAL

           john chamberlain, untitled



Yesterday I had the grave experience of hearing Rush Windbag-Limbaugh, the philosopher of the republican party. All I could think was Forrest Gump's mother saying, "Stupid is as stupid does." Stupid was the only word I could think. I don't like to point the finger at somebody for being stupid, because 3 fingers point back at me. Nonetheless, the obvious is obvious. Reading a tree by its fruits. A statue of Windbag could have the word on his pedestal, STUPID. Of course, American white men would disagree. It makes me sad for the white man to have such a bozo for their representative. He does not represent me. He does not represent democracy. He is the cutting edge of preparing us for full-blown police state. Of course, that's what the white man wants, law and order, keep the niggers down, more prisons, more attacking poor, defenseless countries of colored people in pre-emptive strikes to keep them from killing us first. It's the same as keeping the niggers in prison and eliminating them by capital punishment. This is policy at home, and keeping the colored poor in the rest of the world down is foreign policy. It's the core of the American belief system, like in the Randy Newman song, Rednecks, "keepin the niggers down."



Yesterday was the third time I rode with this driver in the public transportation to take me to Winston-Salem for a computer reading of my "device," the pace maker / defibrillator. That is a 5 to 10 minute procedure and that was it. Then, to get the driver's cell phone to tell him I'm ready, I had to call from the public phone, as I don't use a cell phone. It was all computer voices. Options, press 1, press 2, press 3. I needed to charge the long-distance call to my phone at home to reach his cell phone number that was set for Sparta, though he and phone were in Winston-Salem. Before it could be charged to my home phone, they had to call my number to verify it is my number. Unfortunately, I was not at home to verify it was me calling, so I couldn't make the call. I went to a desk that looked like an information desk with a woman who looked over-worked, under paid, under appreciated and in a bad mood. I explained my telephone dilemma, she made the call, that was that.



The driver came along right away and we went over to pick up 2 other riders, who would be ready soon. He had the radio on Rush Limbaugh telling the latest additions to the republican belief system, what liberals are doing that we're supposed to hate today. I rode with this driver twice before, and bore with Limbaugh on the radio. First time, I listened because I'd never heard him before. I'd heard plenty of brief clips, but never listened to him, really, to pay attention to what he was saying. It was just white working class rant to my ears, the tone of voice of every sentence starting with, By God! The rant got old fast, especially when the content was false with intent to mislead and assert his agenda, police state. Second time I rode with this driver, the Windbag and similar nonsense was on the radio the whole way there and back. I swore to myself that next time I was saying something. Didn't want to. Wanted to be nice. Don't make waves.



I'd been sitting there riding through Winston-Salem traffic reminding myself of intent to ask him to turn it off this time. We pulled into the parking lot for the people to be picked up. On the radio, this moronic voice said the 99% in the occupy ranks are going to college; when they're out of college, they'll be the 1%. Driver was starting to get out of the car. I said, "Please turn that off." He did. Wow, I thought, that was easy. It worked. I was even level-headed enough to edit the shit out of, Turn that shit off. His solution to the issue that I obviously don't want to hear it, was to turn the sound all the way to left on his speaker and keep it down low enough that I can't hear it and he can. I didn't want to disrespect him by laughing. All I could think was, Man, you embarrass yourself.



Otherwise, I take him for an intelligent man I've had enjoyable conversation with. Then I see him reaching his ear into Windbag's words the way some people listen to preachers, and he diminished before my eyes more than I wanted him to. It's not that he's a fascist, I don't care what he believes politically. But when he has to put it in my face like it's automatically expected I'm that stupid, I have to withdraw. I don't mind being thought stupid, but when I have to live with that judgment, then I have to turn and go. My self-esteem is not that desperate. The driver diminished himself further telling me that ABC, CBS, NBC and listed other tv news shows, leaving out Fox and, not thinking to include it, NPR, accusing them ALL of being LIBERAL. I didn't want to get this going. I said, NPR is definitely not liberal. The rant in his voice was the same as the radio rant he fills his head with daily.



Then I get home, after relaxing in Selma's coffee shop, visiting with Tom Herring, probably talked an hour. He's of a mind politically that I'm not, but in his case I like to hear what he has to say, and when I disagree with his way of seeing something, I'm not so sure I know why and pay more attention to what he's saying, because he's not talking nonsense. He's talking experience. I imagine Tom and the guy driving would vote the same, but not for the same reasons by any means. One, I listen to, pay attention to, because he tells me perspectives I've not not seen before. He's not swaying me toward the right wing and has no such intent. He will listen to what I have to say too. We don't write each other off as stupid because we disagree politically. Neither of us rants and neither of us is able to listen to the Windbag of the airwaves. But when I got home, I turned on NPR news. They were telling about the Iowa caucus and front runners and losers, never mentioning Ron Paul, except incidentally, just like the corporate media. It is a media-wide refusal to take him seriously. I laughed out loud. NPR liberal? Ask Juan Williams.


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A MOMENT IN TIME

     ernest trova, falling man



Earlier, I heard myself talking to myself in my head say, "By this time in my life I know what's important."
I thought, "Really? Is that barking to hear your head roar? Or do you really think you know?"
"Yeah," I thought, "I know. Wouldn't have said it if I didn't?"
"Is that a fact? Tell me another good one."



The answer to the question of what is important, my assessment is that mountain music is important. It is important because it carries the living spirit of mountain culture. As the culture fades away, pushed aside by corporate pop culture and mass merchandising, television, the old-time religion continues to be the spirit of the culture. Old-time music carries the spirit of the culture, too. As long as there are Primitive Baptist and Regular Baptist churches the spirit of the culture will continue. It's the same with old-time music carrying the culture. Fiddlers conventions, dances, jams keep the music going. As people change, the ways of the churches change and the ways of playing the music changes. It has changed in the way it was played all along over the last two and a half centuries. Mandolins have been creeping into old-time bands over the last several years. It used to be that when somebody asked the difference between bluegrass and old-time, I'd sometimes say, the mandolin. When a mandolin is in the band, it's bluegrass. That rule of thumb doesn't apply any more. Everything changes.



I believe the spirit of the people of these mountains is important. Changing culture has changed away from the pre-electricity culture that was in these mountains. The spirit of the culture continues to live, even though the culture is largely gone. But not entirely. And I don't believe it will ever be gone entirely. This pop civilization that has replaced all traditional cultures, Italian, Korean, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Tunisian, Ethiopian. We have pockets of all these cultures being erased from one generation to the next as they're absorbed by the pop corporate culture that is inclusive, incorporates everything, even what's opposed to it. It's like rock & roll in that way, the way it incorporates everything it's exposed to. I have a feeling, without a lick of certainty, that this television culture that has become homogenized American culture won't last a great deal longer. I've an idea it's transitional.



The old traditional cultures all around the globe have to go. We are now in the Age of Electricity and will always have electricity into the future. The traditional ways from before the coming of electricity, Prometheus unbound, evidently have to go completely away. Everything is different now. The entire surface of the moon photographed. Possibly the entire planet Mars is photographed by now. Earth is completely photographed. The planets only slightly known before electricity, except by astrology, but intimately known by now, scientifically, thanks to electricity and oil, the planets are so closely studied by now by means unavailable before electricity and oil.



There is coming a time the oil is going away. We'll always have electricity. When we settle down from this time of international homogenization as all the traditional cultures in the world change from traditional folk tunes to Britney Spears and Coco Lee, getting facelifts to look more like tv, I've a feeling something is going to take place like the phenomenon of the Lord coming again, however that may manifest. When that happens, we'll collectively be so blown away we may just go to liking one another. Wouldn't that be an interesting world to live in for awhile. It has the potential for the Truman Show and Disney World Forever just a little too much for comfort. It may be so glorious an ecstasy of light the people living in that time would be so deeply changed that, again, everything that went before is no more.



For now, not thinking of the unknown future, which cannot possibly turn out to be any way it might be imagined, thinking only of now, mountain music is important because it carries the spirit of these mountains about the purest it can be carried from one generation to the next. If it goes away culturally, we have recordings galore now, field recordings, every kind of recording of every mountain musician there just about was. I believe it's a good thing. A new kind of mountain culture may evolve in the distant future that wants no connection with the past. Or it may evolve to want to remember the music. It can't be known. Maybe a psychic could see it and tell us. But who would believe it? It's not to be known, not even to be thought about except as a waste of time.



Now. It's the same word all the time, the ongoing continuum of consciousness, in motion and in stillness at once. I can't say Now moves through time, because it seems to be outside time. Time may measure sequences of events, as they used to say in the mountains, "hands goin," or one after the other. Maybe now is inside time to the degree that it is the center of the clock, the part that turns in place. There is much a feeling of going through time, or we are still and time is moving by us. Maybe the still Now is inside ourselves. The sense of Now as both moving and still may be the yin yang, the duality in it. I think I see it a point of consciousness that sees through our eyes, hears through the ears, and so on, awareness.



Everything happens around that awareness. Other people driving in cars, every car going to a different place. Waiting at the stop light. Watching the rain out the window. Fall turns to winter day by day, night by night. Now moves from one calendar date to the next continually. Now also has nothing whatsoever to do with numbers and clock hands. Like the yard stick measuring a length of string has nothing whatever to do with the length of the string. It's a standard of measurement to determine its length in numbers. The Now in different forms of seeing it go through time, if that's what it does, or if time goes through Now like a thread pulled through a needle's eye. I'd better stop, the quicksand is pulling me down.



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