The following collection was reaped from writings at least 10 to 12 years old. It may be that a few of the selections have been included in other similar collections in Compendium: The Kitchen Sink in the past three-plus years, but I don’t think so. Even if some are making a reappearance, I find it interesting to consider how little change has taken place, or how rooted these things have become in the landscape of the culture as the years have passed: places and names have changed, but the wars and economic dynamics and consequences remain.
This is disappointing and oddly reassuring at the same time, if only in how it makes the cultural behavior patterns, particularly of the rulers and economic kingpins, predictable… at least. And inasmuch as that predictability does not often offer easy and ready inroads to dismantle and/or make the adjustments necessary to assure our own survival and the survival of the least and the most vulnerable of all our relations, it does present us with the ability to analyze these repetitive patterns and through our diligence and inventiveness, find portals to the heart of the beast, so to speak…
In the meantime, I’ve been enthralled by a book “Copernicus’ Secret” by one Jack Repcheck. In it he presents a detailed and absolutely engrossing account of the circumstances and personalities around Copernicus’ “discovery” of the heliocentric nature of our solar system… and why it took almost a century until the likes of Galileo and Kepler were able to popularize that vision of the solar system, in spite of rather significant and stubborn interference from the obtuse religious leaders of the day, and “see” in the heavens the evidence of what Copernicus labored for 40 years to find mathematic and schematic proof of. More on this later…
Contents:
1) The Habit of Power
2) What to do to Work Against the Idea that Acts of War are a Reasonable Response to Conflict.
3) And so Shadrack, Meshach and Abednego Went Forth Into the Mouth of the Fire
4) One Difficulty Die-hard Dem Progressives Have
5) The addiction to the happy ending is a great tool for propagandists too.
6) What living in a war zone means
7) True Enough
8) On Reading that the War in Afghanistan Should be Continued for the Benefit of its Women
9) Pie, Pie Eaters, and the Loss of the Idea of the Infinity of Lard
10) A Popular Current Assumption –or— the Denial of the Need for Education based in the Arts and Humanities
11) The Long Long Long Long Campaign Season is Upon Us
12) No matter. It will happen again
13) The only real choice
14) A Poem: Recovery
1) The Habit of Power.
Is this the habit cultivated by such men (and increasingly women) in power? When they cannot bring themselves to admit that their actions are clearly reprehensible to anyone's understanding of ethics, morals and legal precedent?
They may have what they often call a ‘hearing’ to talk about it, all together, for longer than anyone can pay attention or in closed rooms where no one can hear the gross machinations and manipulations of clear legal intent, to mold it into absolution and forgiveness, but nothing really comes out of such proceedings short of a reinforcement of what has already been put into place… a predetermined allowance for the drift into legalized Manicheism and the utter defilement of the terms of basic humanity.
I saw an interesting movie ("Conspiracy") based on the transcripts of a meeting held by upper echelon Nazis to decide if the final solution was indeed legal under German law. The movie rapidly evolved into something Beckett, Ionesco or Albee would have been proud to author... although without as much pre-requisite humor. Terror yes; humor... not really. Not when one thinks of Fallujah and Abu Ghraib. This is exactly the absurd and catastrophically dense ridiculousness that such officially sanctioned and in-house "inquiries" are made of.
2) What to do to Work Against the Idea that Acts of War are a Reasonable Response to Conflict.
1) Take and maintain a strong and uncompromising position that military intervention merely complicates and makes worse the circumstances in places where there are outbreaks of civil strife.
2) Develop, reach and put forth a utilitarian plan to implement a set of alternative interventions that could be implemented in similar situations such as Libya's and promote this vision as the only logical choice, representing evolution away from the counterproductive nature of war.
3) Strongly and unequivocally urge that actions against global tyrants must be uniform and consistent when movements for democracy erupt, regardless of the interests of influential corporations and industries.
4) Require industries, if they are to be considered "people" with the same rights as persons, to be held accountable for their dealings in places where tyrannical control is exercised, whether it is in their corporate, bottom line, interests or not.
5) Outline and actively pursue establishment of far-reaching legislation that deals stridently and forcefully with corporations that benefit from tyranny and methods used to sustain or cooperate with tyranny.
6) Establish legal precedent that equate doing business with or through tyrants as unlawful as it would be for an individual person to be an accessory to a crime.
3) And so Shadrack, Meshach and Abednego Went Forth Into the Mouth of the Fire [Written in regard to the Fukushima nuclear disaster]
It would be fit and just if all politicians and wealthy government shills, the ones who are the strongest proponents of building more nuclear power plants, would be the ones required to go into the highest-risk areas to fix what's wrong. But what kind of greater risk would the world be subject to if we were able to corral them (kicking and whining about not having the right color tie, no doubt) into such a task?
Besides, that's entirely unrealistic if one takes into consideration the current preponderance of moving speeches from the mouthpieces of the plutocrat class requiring that everyone make deep sacrifices in bad times except for themselves; bad times that they had a very active role in creating. They will grow richer, even from “smart investments” that take advantage of catastrophes such as this one. And they appear to believe in their manifest destiny to send others into danger while staying clear of it themselves.
Still, the story is really about some incredibly brave and selfless people willing to do what must be done in spite of the dire sacrifice they must personally make doing it. One could only hope that a few people with that kind of personality make-up would be elevated to global leadership positions.
But then, even if that were possible, I doubt if someone blessed with those altruistic personality attributes would be capable of cultivating the interesting relationship to the truth that our current crop of plutocratic politicians, and their "corporate person" benefactors, seem to have.
The Floating Nature of the Truth, or, The Gift of Making Lies Honest: An unfortunate pre-requisite in this culture of the propaganda of fear and the wealthiest class’s re-assertion of their pre-habeas corpus “rights” to power and ownership.
4) One Difficulty Die-hard Dem Progressives Have
The only difficulty die-hard Dem progressives have is related to their apparent inability to see and present their candidates realistically from the get-go.
While the Dems invent and present great spin to get lefties still in their ranks salivating over the public relations dog and pony show during the interminable (and obscenely expensive!) presidential election season, they rarely deliver the goods.
Nor can they. They remain beholden to the same disloyal and very nearly treasonous offshore corporate kings that hold the Republicans proudly raptured while they engage in the pillage of the economic foundations of the country. Obama, whatever the nature or expression of his alleged authenticity as a progressive leader, remains a butler to the neo-feudalist Lords and Ladies of an emerging global Medievalism. He will go on to preside over the final dismantling and death of the only chances the US has ever had of continuing to move in a direction for which the egalitarian evolution of the Jeffersonian ideal laid the foundation.
This should come as no surprise to most of who have been paying attention, although it does surprise those who were suckered by Obama’s ascension to the throne of the ultimate symbol of equality. Alas, symbol does not equal substance. In the world of deep corporate psychological electioneering and public relations, it can be exactly the opposite. Dystopian fictions are only effective because of the potential we have of being turned into them; they are built on these same kinds of themes, the dissonance between what is portrayed and what is actual. Certainly American society has existed well within the confines of those dystopian norms for much of its existence, even if one only takes an honest account of its relationship to race and enslavement.
A message of hope unfiltered through rational self-examination and a dispassionate critique of message versus action is quite seductive. It has been used successfully by every snake oil salesman and phony preacher that ever walked among the poor and hungry to rob them of the last dime sewn into the hems of their coats or stashed in their hidden cigar boxes. Say it loudly and prettily enough and you will naturally attract the attention and the potential following of those who have nurtured the tiniest kernel of it regardless of how many bombs, literal and figurative, have been dropped in their neighborhoods and on their families. Betray it or smash it by showing your true lack of commitment to it and you risk turning your once adoring public cynical and uncooperative. Your only option then is silence or disregard. And to get your praise and pre-requisite adulation from those who benefit from the dissonance.
5) The addiction to the happy ending is a great tool for propagandists too.
Why plumb the humanity of those who do not win but fight the good fight when, in fact, those who exercise some control over such things would prefer that people not fight at all, but half-delusionally expect that they will be made into spiritual and material billionaires regardless of how many Katrina-like storms purge the coastlines of the world of the workers and the poor.
Perhaps this is an extreme view and smacks of an intentional or unintentional conspiracy perspective that has no really accurate antecedent in how we go about organizing ourselves politically and socially in the world. There is nothing wrong with a well-wrought, multi-leveled, tale with a happy ending, but all one has to do is look around to see that it is a wish more than a reality for most, rich or poor or somewhere in between.
The sadness or, more likely, ambivalence, of how we do not go gentle into that good night (or simply fade into the darkness in our undisturbed and uninteresting sleep) is where the real literature of living lies, and the richest tales percolate and inspire.
6) What living in a war zone means
Because most Americans haven't a clue about what living in a war zone means, we have few ways or words to accurately, authentically, talk about it. Anything we say ends up sounding trite when compared to the real experience.
That our warlord oligarchy wishes to keep us uninformed about the realities of war is clear. It does not serve their purposes to do otherwise. The language allowed, on a broader scale, of the description of the terrors our taxes inflict in various far-flung battlefields is telling and often reveals the projective fallacy of how we prefer to see the bloody soup of what we call the global fight for our "way of life" and "our values". It is that, a fight for our values... but it is primarily the reality of those values that are kept masked in red, white and blue bunting and in wholly fictional outcomes and rationales instead of the real and symbolic rape, pillage, massacre and gruesome grave robbery that are our wars and our shadowy values .
Even "progressive" descriptions of the real effects and reasons for our addiction to bloodletting and massacre of darker skinned and more ancient cultures are lacking. I contend that the continued firestorm of mutilation and genocide that we as a nation instigate and maintain is much more deeply ingrained in our national and personal psyche than any reasoning that puts mere capital, tyrannical geopolitical and material gain at the apogee of our rationale for pursuing them the way we do. There is something lacking, a hole, in the communication system as it were, between what is genuinely good about us and the darker shit-filled wells of our collective and individual shadows.
That we contend with the absence of productive communication between these two psychic regions of our awareness and "soul" by throwing buckets of offal from those dark wells upon those we deem to be less deserving, less human, but who we perceive have come into possession of something we feel we cannot do without, is more revealing than any even ;progressive article about a war's significance.... especially since those at the helm of even the tiny mainstream progressive community often continue to elect the very same people who are unwilling to recognize and start to knock down the barriers between our goodness and our shadows.
7) True enough
"The 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is sure to bring televised images of somber reflection."
True enough... but more accurate would be the following:
"The 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is sure to bring televised images that justify and rationalize the destruction of the founding principles of the United States' system of governing. Its booby blonds and manikin-smooth faces will be married to a multi-billion dollar campaign industry that only serves to circulate resources among those who are willing to participate in its mendacity and corruption. What remained of the functionality of the two-party system lies in ruins at the feet of the clay Baal of corporate personhood, an invention of a disingenuous and neo-feudal economics system that feeds on creating terror about terror. Torture has become stylish and mainstream. Killing innocents anywhere and everywhere there are resources to be plundered to feed the war machine and its twin, the upper levels of the pyramid of capitalized plutocracy, is ignored, justified and glorified with lies, secrets and silence"
8) On Reading that the War in Afghanistan Should be Continued for the Benefit of its Women
Which Afghan women are we talking about?
The ones who are raped by warlords the occupation forces support?
The one killed as "collateral" during a drone strike?
The ones silenced and threatened with death at the scam of a parliamentary process
just for speaking the truth about the occupation?
The ones stoned for not wearing a burkha?
The ones maimed for acting as if freedom means freedom?
The ones shunned for proposing that educated women are happy women?
The ones whose children are left without limbs from running in a field?
The ones whose homes are invaded and razed in the middle of the night?
The ones whose weddings are bombed?
The ones whose husbands are disappeared and tortured for no good reason other than trying to survive leaving them and their children even more destitute?
The ones forced into prostitution to service the occupiers and the warlords because once the crops were destroyed and the opium field burned and the men killed or forced to belong to one despicable side or the other and gone hiding in the mountains they had no other choice?
The ones whose young sons are forced into the sexual service of warlords?
Which Afghan women are we talking about?
9) Pie, Pie Eaters, and the Loss of the Idea of the Infinity of Lard
Yes. It is certainly important to support those who have too much by making sure a good portion of people don't have enough.
The finite nature of the economic pie assures that as it gets eaten, and as the ingredients disappear, the people who have more pie than they need, and are inevitably in control of distribution of the pie and its ingredients, will make sure that a growing number of people get less and less so that they can continue to tout the benefits and freedoms of being in possession of a pie that gives them more and more.
No matter that their burps from being over-fed are making everyone sick in the kitchen... especially when the people who don't have enough pie are told that smelling, deeply, other people's pieces of the pie, pieces that used to be theirs, is the next best thing to eating a piece.
It will be interesting when the finite supply of the ingredients, not to mention the pie itself, has been consumed to the point that people get to see their pieces dwindle into aroma and crumbs for the benefit of those who have more than enough. But then... that's freedom! That's democracy!
War for pie! War for lard and cinnamon! Revolution for wheat! Let them eat Pie! Astounding rates of childhood cancers in the Depleted Uranium kitchens! Hospitals for the exponentially growing numbers of deformed and dying children. Named after the biggest pie-eaters and/or invaders’ wives! Yahoo! Googleoogle! Where’s Ionesco or Beckett when we really need them! This is so Facebookian! How many Twits or go-fund-me campaigns can you put out about your three-year-old who has a rare cancer, only one arm and who could desperately use a piece of pie!
You are free to wish you had a piece of the pie dear, even when there is simply no pie left to have, you can even vote for it! Even though what is left must feed the tremendous mythos, nurtured by those who are rich beyond your puny ability to conceptualize, that turning middle class pie-eaters against the lower classes is a great way to monopolize the pie in a system of baking that really no longer can sustain itself or the kitchen it's being cooked in.
How much can they eat when the pie is running out and the people that have the vast majority of access to it aren't giving any up? THE PIE IS FINITE. SEE? THERE IS NOT ENOUGH PIE TO GO AROUND. OKAY? THE PIE IS DISAPPEARING AS WE SPEAK. SHAZAAM! IF YOU HAVE MORE THAN YOUR SHARE IT IS BECAUSE SOMEONE ELSE HAS NO PIE OR NOT ENOUGH. ONE CANNOT EARN ONE'S PORTION WHEN THE PIE PLATE IS EMPTY. Yes we have no bananas. ONE CANNOT MAKE PIE OUT OF MUONS OR DARK MATTER OR THE BLOOD OF THE VICTIMS OF WAR FOR OIL! AS THE SUPPLY OF THE PIE IS REDUCED, IN ORDER FOR THOSE WHO HAVE THE LION'S SHARE OF IT TO KEEP THE AMOUNT THEY HAVE, SOMEONE ELSE MUST LOSE PART OR ALL OF THEIR SHARE.
God... how stupid can we be? The word for the day is: FINITE FINITE FINITE... the supply of ingredients is not endless... get it? AS THE FLOUR WATER LARD AND BERRIES RUN OUT SO TOO DOES THE ABILITY OF EVERYONE WHO WANTS PIE TO MAINTAIN THE SAME SHARE of it. SOMEONE HAS TO LOSE SOME PIE. OKAY?
There’s a certain amount of insanity in this insistence that people must work for their pie when there is not enough pie to go around and no one is giving up any, or worse, insisting that they should have even more as it runs out.
10) A Popular Current Assumption –or— the Denial of the Need for Education based in the Arts and Humanities
A popular current assumption is that 1) everyone could somehow be re-geared, regardless of their inclinations, talents and interests, to be a computer programmer, accountant or business executive or manager, and 2) that there is enough employment in these fields to provide a living wage to each and every ex-playwright or anthropologist who was guided “wisely” into a vocational path or change of major in his or her sophomore year to fit into the presumed direction of a society’s employment needs as opposed to their loves and passions..
This assumption presumes infinite growth in all areas of how the global economy is designed to deliver the most money to the fewest people at the top of an economic pyramid that continually must shave people off it's middle and working class to continue to deliver increasing profitability to those at the top.
This idea of infinite growth is absurd, of course, but it has become the song and dance of every politician and trade school scammer/recruiter who wishes to make friends, in reality or ideologically, with the most wealthy of the wealthy who are in the process of defoliating any remains of the more egalitarian distribution of goods, services and return ushered in by a few terrifically catastrophic economic disasters and wars in the past 200 years. Short memories seem to work best in people who stand to have nothing to lose by doing the same things over and over and expecting different results.
Personally, I would prefer to be a dog-walker with a theatre degree than an artist who was convinced that he or she must spend 40 hours plus a week in a cubicle and who, in the end, has no inspiration, energy or time to paint. History and psychological studies are full of the tragic stories of people, famous or infamous or completely insignificant, who deny their true natures and what they are deeply inclined to do with their lives in order to satisfy parents, or teachers or the false wisdom of a cultural norm that denies the import of communities being populated by people who are skilled in how to look at the world, not just how to manipulate it for profit.
But then, without the Humanities, no one would have to know that either.
11) The Long Long Long Long Campaign Season is Upon Us
The most interesting part of the upcoming and unbelievably expensive long long long long campaign season will be witnessing the perennial Democrat faithful blame those of the Independent Left who refuse to buy into pretty speeches backed up by continued devastating concessions to the corporate Right. It will be easier than fessing up to their part of the great political bi-partisan tsunami of the past thirty years that has drowned and irradiated the balance of powers and pushed the center further right than it has been since that great and under-rated president Herbert Hoover, if not since the beginning of this experiment of government by and for the people. They will continue to reference what the president has said as proof of his intention and ignore what he and his party have done. Their six to ten figure salaries depend on it.
It will also be jaw-droppingly obvious that the name of the game is to placate the Left with words and placate the moneyed corporate "persons" with deeds that are in complete opposition to the words.
The dupes from the Left will continue to be duped; it’s already in play. And the Dems will either lose, or if they win they will fail to seize the moment due to the leashes and muzzles put on them by their corporate handlers. This pattern is already part of the record, if we understand Pelosi and Reid’s upper and lower house, and the absence of a Public Option presence from the table of health care reform, as the model from which the Dems dare not waver.
Not unless the entire country is turned into a permanent Wisconsin will there be a change. And just as in Egypt, where the system became the thing to preserve and not the president, a few leaders may be sacrificed, but in the end the politicians are the wrong target and removing them only gives the reigns of control back to the real power brokers who will buy more hope and change or tea party rhetoric and manage to squeeze the life out of those words just as they squeeze the life out of the workers, the middle class, and the powerless disabled and poverty class.
Please Sir? Can I have some more?
The first steps of this campaign season bi-partisan operation to continue to disinherit the public’s control of its wage-purchased services, funds, lands and public programs and hand them over like a stuffed pig to the richly bequeathed upper 1% are already on the table. Fists will be raised and emotions stirred by the scientifically psyched speeches from the Pres and the rest of the Dems against this carpet bagging of the people's money and resources, but in the end the faux compromises made and ludicrously framed as "centrist" will even make the graves of a good many great Republicans from the past shake and erupt.
Meanwhile these changes will serve to hang out, as clownish effigies on the biggest oak of legitimized torture, destruction of habeas corpus, so-called corporate personhood, and the Imperial Presidency, all the great reformers, statesmen and women on the powerful court of activists from our great history of progressivism; everyone from Tom Paine to Emma Goldman, Frederick Douglas, Susan B Anthony, Martin Luther King and Howard Zinn… those who did the real work to move this country toward a realization of its promise of equality to all its citizens. Question: How much better would the budget look if it were required that every corporate dollar used to buy a candidate for office be matched by a dollar put into the coffers of Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, or even the public schools? BTW: I, and maybe they, can’t wait until the upcoming poor people’s riots. Then they can really put the Patriot Act into use domestically. I'm just sayin...
12) No matter. It will happen again.
No matter. It will happen again. The Iroquois and the Shawnee are still roofless, and the Armenians remain unfettered in their grief with or without the Irish potatoes or the Mau Mau. A million Iraqis died under the implacable sun burned by the cheery bombs of the doofusses who call the same kinds of massacre different names depending on whose king rises in the wars of the fast-food hamburger logic that has smitten the planet.
And we die. We always die. There's the truth of it. So, move as many graves as you can, but yes, until one can admit that these scoundrels have indeed killed as many innocents and the seeds of Mozart and Goethe, Dante and Kahlo as you and you and you and you have, then we remain lost and demanding our innocence over the graves of somebody else's children. Bring on the drones! Unleash the depleted uranium and white phosphorous! The tears of the enslaved and the murdered lie together in our backyards if you don' t know it. Someday it could be you!
and it will, no doubt…
13) The only real choice
In my 11 years as a hospice family counselor I came to understand that a vast majority of the people who told me they could just as easily commit suicide as go on living were actually saying they wanted to end HOW they were living, not THAT they were living.
This was a good lesson and something to remember when talking to someone who is feeling despair and alienation and/or any kind of pain to the extent that it makes life seem too hard. And research has shown that survivors of suicide attempts routinely and immediately regret the action they are taking to end their lives, very soon after they take it. Survivors of leaps from high bridges report that as soon they are aloft after their leap, they wish they had not jumped.
I am convinced that people routinely underestimate their own will to continue living, in spite of extreme adversity. The will to live, or the will to die, seems to me to be a constantly fluctuating thing. One might think that under certain circumstances... cancer or other life-threatening health issues, or upheavals in intimacy or even war and cultural hardships... that one would choose death over the suffering life imposes, but I saw time and time again people make uneasy peace with suffering and come to terms with it or acclimate to it to the extent that they needed to stay living.
This is not by any means all together true in all instances and shouldn't be. The ability to choose life or real suicide in certain circumstances should be protected and facilitated by the community as a deeply spiritualized choice and option… as perhaps the only real choice and option. But even then, what is being found out is that people given access to the tools of their own demise through legalized assisted suicide more often than not never complete the act… choose living.
14) A PoemRECOVERY
I have seen all those fat
green fingers
bruise the cold dirt
and rise
into the next sun.
It can take weeks
just to push
the pebbles apart but
the miracle
occurs.
We have plenty of stories,
how a dandelion
pushes open
a place
in cement
while all the voices
shout
down
the possibility of bloom
blame
those who want something
beyond the cage
of the seed
for every season
they cannot see
beyond.
I believe
the most unexpected
things
can indeed occur.
It does not matter
what the misers
of the incomplete
sciences
of the heart and soul
have to say.
The tips
of the jonquil
startle
the mud and snow.
Finches find seed
in last year’s
brown flower
rocking
in the cold
March wind.
It isn’t worthwhile
to listen
to what someone else
says
you cannot
do.