We Had a Dream

If you go with Darwin--reality and justice--you can't pick and choose. The other side, our opponents, make stuff up. That's not our standard, but the truth is this: the people who had a dream have lost. No one openly defends injustice. They reconstrue reality and market injustice as something else.

Often, necessity. We have a dream but they have a story. It is vain and self-serving and untethered to reality: the wonderful white man, the face of a thousand heroes, tamer of beasts, clearer of forests and subduer of enemies. He who keeps order. White men must rule or it all falls into disorder.

Chaos, that is. It's white men or chaos, but if there's been a "pax of the white man" where is it? I'll order me up some, a full portion. The record looks bad, noting the holocaust, a blip on any screen. Way to go, white men! But they still assure us, many wars later, that they are the leaders we need.

Alrighty! In order for the dreamers to recover, though, we have to look fairly at the current outcome, which is that the white-man coalition has wiped a lot of floors with us. From there we go forward. We can't go much further back, I keep thinking, but those white guys are redefining it all the time.

Ugh

I was telling a black guy I know about an experience I increasingly have when I catch someone, in an instance of momentary eye contact, cringing a little and writing me off as--ugh--an oldie. Yes, Jim, my friend said, that's what if feels like to be black, all the time.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

Conservatives hate life. It's an interruption, a trial imposed by God, in the true state of perfection and bliss for which we are intended. This is the source of the cynicism. Life is for losers.

They want to escape but have to see it through. They think it's wrong for our earthly existence to be anything other than punitive and difficult. Having conservatives run things only means misery.

Logistics

My father worked in logistics for the Air Force. He was once on a committee of representatives from the various services and headed-up by a guy from the Department of Defense. The idea was to inspect supply depots around the country to determine if it made sense to consolidate the supply of certain things in the hands of the DOD. 

According to my father there was a consensus in the group that it didn't make sense to consolidate any of it. The branches were already into diseconomies of scale independently of one another. But, lo, the report appears, written by the DOD dude, recommending consolidation. My father thinks it was a setup--that the DOD wanted it done.

This reminds me of Ken Starr, for some reason. Anyway, dad refused to sign the report and subsequently got his ass kicked, by so doing. Now, when you look at American businesses and industries and all the consolidation that has occurred, it happened in the same way, not by fair play and the promoting of efficiency, but by influence.

Think of all the formerly locally-owned stores and such which are now nonexistent or part of huge, effectively unregulated and anonymous monster-corps which got that way as part of a gamed and prejudiced system. Yet again, thank you, Republicans, for ruining our country. I remember the locally-owned stores and businesses where I grew up.

They are gone, gone, gone with some kind of ill, right-wing wind--burned, sacked and obliterated, for all intents. It seems inevitable now but it wasn't. It's a choice we made by electing the wrong people, which we did because we, too, were influenced, in subtle and contrived ways. We've been had, but so easily we can't blame anyone but ourselves.

Necessarily Insufficient

Everything is under-determined over time, but entirely determined over more time.

Trump v. Tomatoes

I'm occupied these days with astonishment at the rise of Donald Trump to the ascendency of something, whatever indescribable malfunction and breakdown this represents, and eating tomatoes, my garden producing an explosion of these wonderful things, from bite-size miniatures to terrifying cannonballs capable of causing real harm if carelessly deployed. 

Always I soothe my soul with rock 'n' roll but, generally, it's Trump versus the tomatoes at my house lately, with the Trump thing blowing every meter and measure I have available. Truly Trump is a fifteen on a ten-scale so higher math is required, and I think we've got to go beyond normal methods to get the guy on the page in graphing whatever it is he represents. 

What he represents, I don't know, apart from a huge "screw you" arising from the souls of puritanical Republicans craving utopia and coming unglued over the horrible imperfection of everything. I celebrate and embrace imperfection. It enables me to do as well as I can with my own inadequacy and failings. Perfectionism is horrible and a curse.

In my experience of certain clinical cases, meaning diagnosed OCD, there is usually a dump or landfill around. In every instance I've seen the person has a closet or part of the yard which is a dump, so I think Trump is a dump, a repository of repressed, right-wing psychological garbage and the refuse of denial, probably composting, at his age.

He's the closeted reality of Republicanism, slowly emerging. Meanwhile I'm eating myself into oblivion with tomatoes, all that digestive energy diverting from the Trump conundrum. I've never seen a technically perfect tomato, the embodiment of the form, but I love them and I'm ready to share. You may contact me about this, as long as the harvest lasts. 

Hell Comes to Whoville

Who is Whoville? It must be us. By that I mean some clan of believers, people with certain values, of generosity and caring and fair play and humor, in an undefended and borderless burg visitors to which are won over by the wise ways of the open-hearted Whos.

But Hell has come to Whoville. It was the values that made them special and the values are lost. There wasn't a formal assault--recognizable evil. It came from within and in the form of confusion. Also it occurred over time, rather slowly. They forgot who they were.

Let us mourn the Whos. Let us mourn ourselves.

Talk About Baggage

Even runaway trains have engineers and conductors and administrators and all. This is the script Republicans have chosen for us, a disaster movie, where we are hurtling toward destruction and so reckless indulgence, sanctimony and despair jostle for position in an environment of fear, awaiting the end. So where are we? 

Watching helplessly from the baggage cars, I suppose, not even villains, as their delusion nears its climax in a crash of unknown severity depending on where, exactly, we come off the rails. They will elect a leader, it seems, an engineer, based on the aerodynamics of his hair so he'll look good out front and not impede anything.

 After all, it's only a role.

Blithe Spirits

The scene in Shakespeare in Love keeps popping into my head in which Judi Dench, playing the disguised Queen, stands up abruptly in the theatre and makes a crack about wearing her name out, she deserving more respect. Judi as well, I think, and then there's God. With an election forthcoming--ugh--many names are coming up, including various Founding Fathers. 

Much of it works at the level of assumption and presumption, though sometimes the names are explicitly dropped, and I picture them standing up, Thomas Jefferson or God, let's say, and asserting their right not to be cited in defense of some policy or scheme. Let's keep this in mind as the carnival continues and the debates begin. Maybe I will don a guise. 

Picture me, one in an anonymous crowd of debate watchers, rising suddenly in a tricorn hat or numinously and asserting my right not to be assumed to be backing some Huckabee sponsored hucksterism or Bush boosterism or other nonsense. I won't have it, I will say, as I'm escorted to a special seat or just ascend my ass out of there.

LOL

Donald Trump for President. LOL, LOL, LOL,...

Wankers or Toadies?

I can't decide which word best describes right-wing suck-puppets, so I put it up for a vote: is it wankers or toadies?

Creep Thought

Creep Thought is a deranged supercomputer, evidently in the hands of right-wing extremists, capable of a higher degree of twisted calculation than an unhinged Einstein on amphetamines. Additionally it has a "chew on this" function which enables it to use free resources on questions of no immediate practical application, such as the meaning of death, despair and nothingness.

The computer also cheats at chess and counts cards. Republican meta-psychologists had found that it was hard to thwart the normal empathetic functioning of aggregations of human beings over time. Individual sociopaths are all over the place but to get people to practice the inverse of the Golden Rule consistently was not easy and required highly-evolved algorithms of perversion. 

Within Republican ranks there is tension between those who want only to make money and those who want to hasten the end of the world, but there is a common desire for cash because rushing the apocalypse turns out to be expensive. The world doesn't want to end yet and the money crowd doesn't want to die but religious fundamentalists are in control and increasingly insistent about their aims.

The computer, originally code-named "non-sequitur" but now affectionately known as Sarah, for Sarah Palin, has recommended selfishness as the quickest path to world self-annihilation. This primal human trait is the fastest way to destruction. And the answer to the ultimate question, of death, despair and nothingness? Sarah Palin. Self reflection, that is. Look only to yourself and you will find nothing.

The Quest for Cuervo

I need a drink. And, I mean, I need to be permanently, partially drunk to deal with the stuff going on around me. Anyone who thought that humanity is heading, inexorably, for a more-evolved place, I say to you: Donald Trump. Hand me the Jose.

Partial Reality

You know, I think there's reality and then, well, unreality. It's hard to imagine them mixing it up and getting along, like matter and anti-matter, but then there's humanity, stuck in a strange, contradictory existence. People are capable of self-awareness, abstraction and reflection but still mortal and witnesses to their own personal and corporate decay. 

By corporate I mean our inability not to cause the destruction of our own species, but three cheers for us anyway. The planet and universe may do well to see the end of humanity. Let's suppose it's our inevitable end and nothing to be fought against or resisted or derided, but there's an aspect to us I find intriguing, that we appear to live in permanent partial-reality.

We can't exist without some grip on things but can't get the other foot out of the swamp of insanity and compulsion. Then the alligator comes and pulls us entirely under or maybe we just give up and sink-in out of fatigue and despair. Whatever. But what do we find so compelling about the swamp of unreality? Oh, reality is our mortality and we don't like that.

Tough shit, as we used to say when I was a kid. There's a lot to be said for reason and truth and the justice of accepting our fate and living in a truly civilized way, firstly with a sense of responsibility to one another and a willingness to share the resources needed for our individual and corporate survival. Maybe there's a species version of reincarnation and we'll get another shot. 

We seem to have blown it, this time.

Rebels Without a Cause

What an amazing thing it is to consider that the reactionary right might be caught in the flames they have fanned for so long, those of bigotry and resentment and exclusion and aggression, and that the agent for this may be his hairness, Donald Trump.

For decades now reasonable Americans have watched unbelievingly as the crazy bar moves higher and higher. The only filter Republicans seem to reliably apply is "not crazy enough." They'll jettison anything in favor of the bright, shiny new object of insane desire.

Truly, the coefficient of crazy is higher than ever and Republicans must have a secret, probably unconscious, compulsion to destroy the American state, like adolescents challenging authority from a need to be assured of the authority's strength.

I say: grow up. Republicans are difficult children--truants, renegades and delinquents--and must not be indulged or allowed power over anything. They will only wreck it, wanting reassurance of its resiliency. It's not for the rest of us to be responsible for this.

We can't be. It's simply not our place.

Trashed

I was riding in the car once with a friend and the SUV in front of us barfed out some fast-food trash just before turning into a subdivision, a Habitat for Humanity subdivision, an unusual thing. Someone gave them a tract of land. Normally they build individual houses here and there. The two people in the SUV were Hispanic. 

My friend thought that the trash-barfing was cultural, that they didn't see litter as trash or as discordant in the environment, only as "stuff out there," but I will bet you their houses were tidy. No matter, but this is what happens when people are excluded and uninvested in their society and when there is no expectation of justice.

The disunity affects everyone and disunity is what Republicans now promote: average citizens are "stuff out there" to them, trash and road-kill. Average people mean nothing to wealthy Republicans. Maybe it's wrong to say they don't care because it assumes a context where caring makes sense. We are simply nothing to them.

When they talk about freedom they mean their freedom: the freedom to do whatever they want whenever they want, to live on inherited money or have it easy and have all the security imaginable, no matter what, at our expense. It was hard to comprehend the trash thing, that someone could not see it as trash.

But average citizens are now nothing, detritus, being outside of the virtual community of wealth, and undeserving of health care or a job or a fair shake, due to the partisanship, selfishness and polarization. "Black Lives Matter" isn't jingoism. Black lives don't matter. America wants black people to go away.

Now that they've had their use of them. Average white people, get a clue. This now applies to you. The Chinese are slaving away so you aren't needed anymore. If the right-wing crazies destroy the economy again--permanently, this time--you will be left holding the bag in a way you never thought possible. Wait and see.

Too Bad

I've really limited my news input and it has helped enormously with my equilibrium. The election coverage, though, is hard to avoid and then I see that George W. Bush has been paid a big chunk of cash to give a talk to a wounded veterans group. 

At some point you have to cry "uncle" and say that it is all over and just give up. Clearly this is it. If that unrepentant piece of shit can do this without being struck down by the gods of justice or, at least, severely smacked by a wounded vet, all is lost.

We are Yugoslavia

I visited Washington years ago and stayed with a friend-of-a-friend who lived in a tiny apartment above Daniel Patrick Moynihan's house, or part of it. Cool, huh? We went to a performance of Yugoslavian dancers at the Kennedy Center -- Matt was Yugoslavian. 

The dancing was amazing and very diverse, which I commented on and Matt said, well, there's a reason for that: that the country was totally fragmented and religiously polarized and that it would fall apart the minute it wasn't held together by force.

Of course it did, brutally and genocidally. This is us, to a much greater extent than we care to think. We have never been one country but two, North and South. We are now becoming one but on what terms? On those of the South, I would say -- property and privilege.

An aside:

There was another very distant brush with Moynihan, in my life. I had neighbors as a kid, the Finns, and in an act of tolerance now beyond imagining to me they let us neighborhood youths use their small, full-court basketball set-up. We abused it, of course. 

We abused both the court and the kindness. I also house-sat for the Finns. Their older son, Chester, had been Moynihan's aide in India and had married an Indian woman. I think I met them all, Chester and family, and there was a picture or two of Moynihan around. 

Mr. Finn, the father, spoke of Moynihan's charm and how likable and engaging he was. Anyway, the Finns and some other Jewish neighbors were my introduction to a world of higher standards and accomplishment. My parents were smart and well-educated and open-minded and kind.

But there was something those Jewish families introduced me to which I appreciated later, a bigger view of everything. It also rained brisket when somebody died. The last time I ran into a reference to him Chester was still around, at a university, and a Republican.

Darn it. I will always think highly of any Finn, though, because of those parents.

Another Narcissistic Enterprise

My internet travels take me to all kinds of places. This morning's examples: Precision Strategies and The Omidyar Network. These are my peeps, in some ways. We're on the same side, I think, but the self-satisfaction is just so intense. Okay, you're the good guys, but how about we get some shit done?

They do get stuff done but there's a societal aspect to this which takes the whole thing to the same place as the war on drugs: we're funding both sides. I don't want to be a trash-man for the American rightists, cleaning up the messes of the Reaganites and Bush supporters. Let's stop the damage first.

Then we can spend our money actually going forwards, not just trying to undo the bad works of crazy Republicans.

One Oath is Enough

Something's wrong when nearly all of the elected representatives of the Republican party take a second oath in Washington. And that party is always in power because they insist on having their way even when they lose and that second oath is way more enforceable than the other, the oath of office.

This is about Grover Norquist, the anti-tax man. Grover should have been run out of Washington in shame after the Abramoff scandal, a telling glimpse of what these guys actually stand for. We didn't need another glimpse but there it is, the white boys stealing and engaging in insulting, racist small talk.

It is fundamental. Grover's organization is anti-democratic to a revolutionary extent. If we can't stop such an open and blatant challenge to the essential, fair functioning of our government we are done-for and deserve to be. I won't begrudge Grover his private-jet forays to Burning Man.

He can keep all that but he must go.

Cut It Out

Let's be clear, when you hear the word "cut" coming from the Republican side, substitute the word "kill." Cutting is killing. When they move money from people who need it to people who don't people die. When they squander money like bandits in places like Iraq people die. 

While they insist that the war on drugs continue people die. People die while they piss away America's prosperity living like pigs. People die while they shop and play golf and manage their investments and live smug lives. Republicans kill people. This is their idea of normal.

In My Opinion...

Racism is anything other than judging people by standards of behavior.

Original sin is taking things for granted, especially the gift of your life.

Logo-land

I had one of those dreams in which all the ugliness of the world was gone, both the physical ugliness and interpersonal strife. It wasn't wimpy, just not ugly. All the buildings were painted-brick with big windows and they were fresh but not quite gleaming.

It was a multifarious world, full of surprises and small businesses, everything unique but clearly part of a system, with shops and manufacturing and farms and interesting venues of every sort, entirely organic and obviously the product of an evolutionary process.

Even the instances of weirdness and dysfunction and mildly dangerous or threatening places made sense. It all fit and had a role, of a sort. I guess it was a complete melding of a child's view, with the validity of things assumed as presented, and an adult view. 

I was an adult in the dream, kind of, and looking at everything non-judgmentally but not without suspicion, trustingly but not naively. The most remarkable aspect was how everything simply belonged and had a place, as in a biological system. 

People were living as a species in a way that made sense in the world, though at the top in terms of power, and interpersonally like an ecosystem as well, hierarchically, but smoothly and without striving or obsession, and there was only walking and trains.

What was strikingly missing were corporate, consolidated entities. There were bigger things but always still at a human scale. You never turned a corner and saw a mall or a Walmart. The political or social system was transparent, allowing people to do what they do. 

To work and to live. The dream left me with an intense yearning, I'm not sure for what, but I think for immersion and belonging, to be part of a world within which everyone is free and independent and secure, and where there is proportion, logos.

They say somewhere that it was there in the beginning.

Howling Mad

All you can hope for, watching the parade of lunatics now running for president from the Republican side, is that there is an undiscovered mechanism wherein, at the highest level of insanity and perversity, an organism becomes too at-odds with itself to function and raptures or is transmogrified or morphs into another state of being in order to preserve itself, an elemental trick of survival. 

Take Ted Cruz. In order to be as consistently wrong as Cruz is there has to be an understanding, somewhere within him, of what is right but it must be unconscious or repressed. He must be possessed. Aha, there must be a demon in him, or gremlin, which explains the strange, destructive output of the Cruz-entity and the inconsistency of his opinions with everything he purports to be.

He says he is a Christian and a loyal citizen and patriot, a lover of America, and a crusader for what is right and true and, yet, there is no evidence of a conscience at a child's level, that of connecting the dots, simple cause and effect. Cruz/demon must be required to defend itself: the wars and killing, ethno-chauvinism, intolerance in every form, heartlessness in the face of human need, etc.

Perhaps this will act as an exorcism and the demon will flee, leaving an identifiable human form, maybe alive and with a normal, functioning conscience, capable of living with other people in the absence of predator drones, persecution and extreme judging. It is an interesting, indeterminate situation. Demons are notoriously cunning and tough so the Cruz carcass, the bodily vessel, may not survive.

But the soul we assume to be there somewhere, however beaten-down and demoralized, will either be able to function within the body known as "Cruz" or be free, a better outcome anyway for both Cruz, the man assumed to exist, independently of the demon, and society. Keep a crucifix with you in case you encounter him. And maybe some garlic. Be prepared. He's a piece of work.

In Celebration of Shooting Niggers

It's pretty clear that America's long love affair with shooting and otherwise killing and abusing black people has taken on new life. Call it a pastime. On the way somewhere today I saw two pickup trucks flying large rebel flags in celebration of the murders of those black people in Charleston.

This is a criminal culture with a deep streak of defensiveness. For decades Americans have made excuses for their backward, white brethren in Dixie when they couldn't be kept out of sight and dragged their knuckles around the yard, but they're altogether off the compound now and causing trouble.

And behaving more like apes and aborigines than any of their Darwin-loving fellow countrymen. Some years ago Hendrik Hertzberg wrote something fantasizing about the secession of Texas and all the things America could do without that ball and chain. It was too wonderful for words.

Sane and rational and humane, with plenty of PBS. Is it really too much to hope for? Oh, those rebel flags, they haunt us. We kill black people in denial of our destiny, our doom, because they are us, the better part of us, the part that is vulnerable and enduring and free. We, the white people, are in chains.

Any Yankee for President

Barack Obama is the first Yankee president since JFK. Every president in between was a Republican, and an honorary Southerner, since desegregation, or a Southerner: Johnson, Carter and Clinton. 

The South has been holding the country hostage over race forever. America itself will end before this shit does but I'd like to have another Yankee president, just to see their blood boil. And boil it will.

House of Cards

The Republican police state, typified by the NSA, is there to serve only one master, the wealthy elite: the wealthy, Republican elite. Their ruling beauracracy is a combination of Mad Men and House of Cards. The house of cards, though, is our state and society. There is no truth.

Not for them. No reality. No accountability. The marketing is the product: reality is something they make up so the product is irrelevant or nonexistent. They invent and advertise threats that aren't there. Fear is the unrooted, made-up, self-serving result. They love fear.

And they're very good at acting, creating that imaginary world of fear, with mercifully low taxes for them. Let the riffraff pay for their police state. They've got greens fees. The America we knew and loved doesn't exist anymore. There's a play in its place. The plot is simple.

We're the good guys. Lots and lots of finger pointing fills out the drama. The finger is never pointed back at them, but it could be. Whoa, you can't do that! They will not tolerate dissent because their new, invented and inverted America is a fragile fabrication, a house of cards.

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

America was great, but a third of the country was run by terrorists. The other two-thirds, after decades of waffling and unconscionable delays, finally insisted that the oppression end in "Dixie," the terrorist sub-state, in the 1960's, and that the subjugated minority be free.

Capitalists and corporatists then seized power through an alliance with the disaffected inhabitants of "Dixie," anti-democrats, racists and reconstituted rebels (just add desegregation--and stand back). The tactic worked and the American state sank.

Into decline, that is, wanton consumerism and moral decay, marked by compulsion, recklessness, frenzied activity and denial, the sad drive to be as big a pig as possible before it all ends in an orgy of vicariousness, inauthenticity and second-hand experiences. 

Sex and money, though, are pursued first-hand. Empires usually last about 250 years. We were supposed to be an anti-imperial country and immune to this. Also it was thought that knowing the cycle of empires would enable us to avoid it, but we have succumbed.

Those who asserted that we are exceptional and insisted on it have doomed us to an imperial end. Boo, hiss. We're now on the path of "decline and fall" and not an exception. Exceptionally bad, perhaps, because of our power and the falseness of it.

We should say to the world honestly, like good imperialists: "We take what we want. Don't stand in our way."

The Partial Perspective Vortex

I have found a way of inducing and instilling the awareness of how interconnected everything is. Clearly there is a crisis here, brought on by selfishness and self-centeredness, so much so that the denial of reality is rampant. It is now common, for example, for someone to deny that they are doing something while they are doing it and in the presence of witnesses. 

The regimen involves both methods and machinery, and software and hardware, but assumes that the subjects are not entirely deprived of conscience and incapable of seeing the interconnections, that the subjects would feel something if you shot their mother in the head in front of them, that is, and understand that it really happened and can't be spun or undone or remediated. 

Virtual reality works both ways, that's what we have learned. It enhances the sense of connectedness in some people and dulls it in others. The limiting case so far has been George W. Bush. After weeks of effort there was no result so we finally shot Barbara Bush in the head in front of him--she was super-old, anyway--and, still, nothing: no sense of the reality of it.

It didn't work so we have incarcerated him at Guantanamo Bay as a menace to society. It does put a different face on the deaths of all those people, hundreds of thousands, who perished because of him and makes us think that he is an outlier. Guantanamo is pretty close to Florida and Jeb will visit, he says, once he forgives his brother for causing their mother to be shot.

 

People Who Think That Someone Who Doesn't Know Something They Know Is Stupid Are Stupid

Technical Support, are you there?

They're Invested

I have no issue with capitalism, per se, but it's the nature of my writing that I overstate the case to try to overcome the normal immersion of people in their everyday lives. You try to get people to step back and think: "My God, this is crazy." If it is, of course, crazy.

But what is crazy? Sometimes it's hard to figure out but there are rules: vested interest, unreason and religious fanaticism, for example, being important indicators. All three may occur at once and in a complementary way. Are they getting rich? Do they talk sense?

Do they think they have a special relationship with a deity? Ask yourself and you will know. When in doubt: follow the money. Societies create capital, not individuals, so societies have a claim on it. People who deny this are not trustworthy and only want more for themselves.

Human Preserves

Capital is human preserves. You boil people down and add sugar, or pack them in salt or brine them and there you have capital. One person can thus become the means to another's ends and the results not spoil. Natural resources are similar but meaningless without work.

People are preserved through labor and in other ways. This is the boiling and brining. There's no reason why a person shouldn't realize the benefit of their own productive activity but there are impediments to that, evidently insurmountable, in our society.

Capitalists are jealous of God. Their own lives aren't enough for them, but work itself is evanescent and workers are unmotivated when you take away their earnings and unpredictable as well, prone to injury and death, so you find a way to preserve them.

Discipline and deception are components in the preservation, with deception preferred because the human assets are less put at risk since the discipline may involve bodily harm, slavery being an extreme example. Studying it is the way to understand the process.

Wage-slaves are less obviously but more insidiously exploited since they may be convinced of their own autonomy when they have none or at best very little. Witness a worker in an Amazon warehouse. And then there is geofencing, worker site-monitoring.

There's no way to make the case that this kind of treatment is civilized or appropriate. It's an imposition on personal freedom and a violation of individual rights and should be illegal, as a form of intra-species predation, which is immoral by any normal standard.

The Silver Age

When I studied cultures I wondered if it wasn't more fun to live in a decadent age. Living in one now I think that it is more fun for irresponsible citizens but not others. Irresponsibility is rewarded and thrives. Here's where I was once an exceptionalist.

I didn't think it would happen to us. I thought that we were different. Even as we sink you can see it playing out. Those who caused the decline throw everyone else out of the lifeboats and sail away. I would rather go down and drown than be with them. 

Did we ever have a Golden Age? As golden as it gets, I guess. There is a strange brilliance to our technology but our morality is stale and increasingly retrograde. It isn't uncool to think morality matters. It isn't judgemental. Well, it is, but not personally. 

Nobody wants to judge anybody but it's implicit in everything. We make allowances, more so as people are further removed from us, but there must be standards that apply everywhere and to everyone or we are destined forever for failure.

Save Me the Watusi

Is it just me or does the 1960's look to you like the last great flourish of American creativity, openness, innocence and optimism? Man, I miss it. 

Picking Peaches in the New Jerusalem

The setting: a small town in South Carolina, 1960. There's a boy, 16, a country-club white kid from a good family of moderate means. Summers he has access to a flat-bed truck and uses it to collect black guys to pick peaches. He gets $1/picker and doesn't pick peaches. 

He can sit in the shade all day. This is the Republican economic model. You say anything and they scream that they worked for the money, which they kind of did, but the black guys worked a lot more for a lot less. Is it any wonder the white boys want it to stay this way? 

The story is true.

Offer It Up

I want to offer up my entire life, all of the unease and discomfort--not really suffering--to God through an intermediary, maybe James Gandolfini, hoping that some good will come from all the wasteful harm I've witnessed being caused by Republicans. It irritates me so much that they have had their way with our country for all of my adult life and ruined it.

The USA is not what it was. We don't see ourselves reflected in other countries with horrible, unresolvable sectarian shit but that is us and the crazy side has won, as it has in most of those other places. God, this is sad. The worst elements have won and it may never be fixed or I may not live to see it if it is, so I offer up the pain of it through the intercession of that good man, James.

He played a thug but he was a nice person. He must look down and see that the thugs are still in control and how good people--nice, responsible people--are unable to slow the runaway train of Republican madness. As of now, anyway. I do not give up hope but I offer it all up meanwhile because it's better than despair, which I have had enough of already. I am more at peace now.

The Great Repression

Clearly there's a cultural equivalent of repression, with all the bad consequences manifested on a societal scale, the main thing being denial and projection.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, whose the most fucked-up of all? Someone else, of course. 

Someone Stole Helen

The longer I look back the more I think that 9/11 was a pivotal event in our history, one of a few big ones, not that it had to be. It retroactively made the questionable election of 2000 very significant. Think of how it might have been different. Think of the things that could and should have been said, immediately after it happened:

We must grieve first, especially for those directly affected. Terrorists try to create fear. We must not give into it and the attack was easy, anyway. Free, pluralistic, open societies are easy targets. The attack was an attack on our values. If we shared their craziness they might not have attacked us. We must not betray our values because of the attack and become like them. This is what they want. 

It is losing. In fact we must renew our commitment to those values and look carefully to see if we have betrayed them already. We need our strength now and those values are our strength. We can make some good out of this terrible event by recommitting ourselves to our essential beliefs and deepening our understanding of those beliefs. It's also the best way to honor the dead.

And so on and so on. Sadly what we got, because of the utter thoughtlessness and lack of character of our leaders, was the opposite. May there be a shooting range in Hell for them where they are eternally the targets. We abandoned our values and lost our national sense of self and our identity. The terrorists have won. The world is now much more the world they wanted: primitive and uncivilized.

The world of the Trojan war, compulsive and destructive, over nothing, but maybe honor. Think, now, what our Homeric epithets would be. Wise or wily? Reactive or restrained? We have lost. We are not the people we claim to be. We stumble around trying to find ourselves but we're unhinged, a nation of lost souls seeking peace, holding to a self-image that doesn't apply, that we're independent and free.

Good luck to us in looking for peace. We have chosen the gods of chaos, mistakenly or unconsciously, in our insistence on simplicity and certainty. We have planted the seeds of discord everywhere thinking we won't be affected or not thinking at all. The terrorist attacks threw that back at us, showing that we're not immune, not a chosen people, perhaps, and not always right and always right with God. 

The Ronnies

There are all these awards: the Oscars, Grammys, Tonys, Emmys, Obies, the Clios, as we now know from Mad Men, etc. Ronald Reagan blazed a path of creativity that has many followers and has resulted in many adherents to the new Republican doctrine of unreality. Ronnie, in fact, blew clean through the distinction between reality and invention. He is said to have been unable to keep his memories of the movies separate from what really happened and his memory was reportedly outstanding in some ways, nearly photographic. 

Anyway it was probably very visual and, I would guess, correspondingly low on the reality-check scale, an amazing trove or repository of incoherent matter, scattershot images and streams of images selectively nurtured for their value on a personal vanity index. Ronnie's vanity project became the nation's, a parallel world of feel-good stuff, a virtuality, probably needed to soothe Republican souls in carrying the weight of Manifest Destiny and the White Man's Burden of being simultaneously wealthy and worthless.

The Ronald Reagan Awards, or Ronnies, should honor those who have excelled in this creative work, the making-up of a realm of happy-talk, free from the need to conform to any measure of verification or intelligibility. There would be an award for creating the most crippling debt, one for military malfeasance, one for depriving children of food, one for depriving people of healthcare and so on. All of these assume reverse spin, which is the point, and are guised as the opposite of what they are. Freedom is limitation.

Security is risk. Fiscal responsibility is reckless abandon and debt. Individuality is conformity. Respect is presumption. Ownership is enslavement. The statuette is a representation of a chimp named Chump, an iconic and ironic reminder of how easy it is to get people to believe anything and to mimic it, so the nonsense is repeated and believed and on it goes until there is a calamity, like a financial collapse. It is then that the best creative work is done, when it is most hard to deny the reality of Republican incompetence.

We are Utterly Defeated

How is it that the Democrats can fail to see how utterly defeated they are? If they did there would be some hope that, someday, progressive principles would be seen rightly, as the true American tradition and, voilà, the Democrats would be revered and consistently elected to run it all, with the privileged Republican class as a foil, which is how it should be.

But the Democrats have implicated themselves in the Republican mess. No one is effectively representing progressive principles. The system has gone so far right a progressive can't function within it. We need an outsider, someone charismatic, who can blow through all the crap and speak plainly to the American people, a real leader, like Franklin Roosevelt.

Born in the CSA

It hurts my heart that the rebels are misrepresenting America in the world. Rather than outlawing the Confederate Flag in those states that insist, duh, that it has nothing to do with racism I think we should adopt it as the nation's flag. 

And why not adopt the Confederate Constitution, while we're at it. Let them have it all and God bless their pointy little heads. Oh, those are hats, of a sort, and, below them, sheets. In the next Olympics we'll all be chanting: CSA, CSA, CSA!

We're Better

Fuck you, you Lords and Ladies. I soothe myself sometimes with British drama. Okay, okay, it's a choice I make for the visual pleasure of it but, my God, there are people in those shows whose lives are extraordinarily significant and those whose lives are nothing at all. Evidently the lower classes buy into it for whatever perverse reasons. Fuck them all. 

It disgusts me, the idea that there are better and lesser people by birth, and the creation of subclasses of humanity. All this is reinforced in all kinds of formal, above-board ways and in more insidious and entrenched ways by inertia and by the weight of tradition. Why would we welcome this horrible practice into America? We've been a refuge from it for so long. 

But look at how wealth in America accumulates at the top for no reason at all. Nothing to do with innate worth or merit or productivity, anyway. It's impossible for anyone to be that productive, so much so that they have the kind of money these people have. Let them be rewarded, sure, and well enough, but wasn't that already the case, before the 1980's?

When, it was, that Republican economic policy took hold and the rest is misery. There is no doubt that the bad policy caused the extreme concentrations of wealth and that it continues through lies and deceit and strong-armed political tactics, systematically disenfranchising hard-working and loyal Americans, who live responsible lives and really fight the wars. 

We are the United States no longer. Fuck you, too, to the Republicans who have caused this. I hope someday they pay, though it may only be that they are eventually seen for what they are, greedy scoundrels and crooks, and betrayers of the true American traditions of decency and democracy and fair play.

Gods and Monsters

I've just read something on Edward Snowden and I have an opinion about him. I don't know much about it so this is a wide-angle, soft-focus view. To me he is a hero. What he did can't be said to be generically right, as a form of behavior, but in this instance it was right.

It doesn't matter what he intended or if he's a good person or has a big ego or what. At root it all has to do with nukes, no doubt, weaponry that is a totalitarian's dream, a great equalizer. The United States has struggled in trying to come to terms with the nukes.

They are major military mojo. And a paranoid's best friend. Our country was designed to be administratively inefficient, to protect us from totalitarianism, so there's a natural tension. We can level the field by becoming more totalitarian, with respect to the Russians.

Or whomever, and that's a big whomever because the people who developed a taste for fear or got overly attached to it out of familiarity are going to want fear and a focus for it, and with nukes that's easy, though "Islamo-fascism" is catchy and may stick around.

And someone just made it up. Anyway, let's suppose that America has gone somewhat totalitarian out of neurosis over the nukes and other threats, real and invented, and that Snowden is anti-totalitarian--not the man, necessarily, but what he represents.

I think this is the case. And let's look at the fear supposedly justifying things. Do nukes really change everything? I don't think so. Annihilation is annihilation, once or ten times over. One of life's greatest challenges is to put yourself in another's shoes and situation, historically.

When has annihilation not been a threat? It wasn't so long ago that people didn't know to look for rational explanations for things. You start with this, reason, one would think. Once it was all ascribed to gods and monsters to help with the fear. Now consider James Inhofe.

We have a guy in charge of a Senate committee on the environment who believes in causal explanations having to do with gods, and similar people in all kinds of positions of power in Washington and remember, we have nukes, and now no allegiance to reason. 

Oh, 9/11: fear-motivated people were in charge then, anti-rationalists and true believers. The USA as we knew it ceased to exist. It was never a perfect country but damn good in some respects and there were those who loved it in a grownup way, accepting its flaws.

Snowden is the antidote to this, the work of a fear-mongering coterie, our totalitarians. If they weren't justified then Snowden is. I won't fault him. But those other guys, the lovers of fear, have a lot to answer for, as Snowden has shown. And read about ABLE ARCHER '83.

In Wikipedia or wherever, when you have a chance, if you think it doesn't matter. See where the irrational guys can get you when they decide to have some fun and play war games. They almost got us all killed, all the while swearing that they are wise and militarily competent.

Flat-Earthers

What sense does it make to judge a society on how well it takes care of people who don't need taking care of? It's not much of a standard. It's the standard of the flat-earthers, those who deny reality out of fear or stupidity or greed or the need to submit to authority, to dehumanize themselves because they can't handle the responsibility of their own freedom. 

Hail the Conquering Heroes

How did the Kochenlocher boys get so rich? It's all kind of fuzzy. They went to a party, a sendoff for the poor slobs in the workingman's trenches, and woke up insanely wealthy and without a clear memory of how it happened. So they say. The working people may have had something to do with it, you would think, since that kind of money doesn't come out of nowhere, but those workers may get uppity and start demanding a share of the wealth so the money will be declared illegitimate.

Fatherless, and outside the realm of normal human causation, that is. Legitimate as hell on the Kochenlocher end, of course. I mean, what would you do but try to hang on to it in every way possible? And marry, ally yourself and legitimize the cash. Give it a daddy. A libertarian daddy. This is how you reverse-engineer the whole thing, you declare the creation of wealth to be the work of heroic individuals, the Norse gods of big business, excluding everyone else and social systems and infrastructure and so on.

Your think tanks put out memoranda to the effect of your greatness and how your golden touch made all that money in spite of the horrible, lazy working scum trying to hold you back and the hideous feds, memoranda replete with stats and figures and graphs and all kinds of fancy rationalization. There is no social aspect to the creation of that wealth at all, they say. It was a miracle, the miracle of J.P. Morgan's Creek, dwarfing the Loaves and Fishes incident. They are gods, ascended masters. Regard them with awe.

And leave them alone, it is recommended, for God's sake, and for your own good. Somehow, they reassure us, it all works out better that way, even for those whose jobs went away and who didn't come out of that last, libertarian-engineered economic crash intact. We must believe: they are heroes. We must trust them because we need heroes and they're plausible heroes, no matter how all the work actually got done and how many innocent people were hurt or neglected as the Kochenlochers made more and more money. 

Psycho Disaster

Who identifies with some nonentity who gets annihilated as a trivial thing in a violent movie? Nobody does but that was a person, too. Not really, but you know what I mean. Annihilation is something that happens to someone else, especially in a trivial scene or as one of a horde of people obliterated. This is the point of civilization.

Someone could walk up and shoot you but they don't, usually, because we have rules about that. Standards. Laws and regulations. How different is it to have similar rules in the worlds of business and finance? But, no, we can't have that. Why? Because certain persons have the equivalent of assault weapons and others have nothing.

Guess who wants to keep it that way. Financialization is dehumanization. It makes some people, arbitrarily, into nonentities, like some helot slaughtered in a film, the human equivalent of a packing peanut. So, when you go to see the new Mad Max movie, identify with all those slaughtered nonentities. Clearly they were not chosen.

They were not the elect, not preordained for salvation. The financial types must have been preordained for multiple money orgasm. The chosen choose themselves and then brazen it out from there, hoping they don't bite off too much and get caught at the chicanery. They think they've won but can't comprehend that some people don't care.

That it's not an issue for them, who's on top. Until, that is, the psychos take over and they get so hammered they have to act, meaning they are subjected to the financial version of someone walking up and shooting them. Has this not happened? It has, again and again. The sick thinking of Calvinism, the fatalism, determinism and resignation, is pervasive. 

People are persuaded that you get what you deserve and that it's inevitable. The winners foist this on those with hardship who, in fact, enable the rich to get rich, in many ways but notably by not shooting them. Deprivation is a slow form of slaughter. There is no freedom in insecurity. It causes fear and resentment but it's a big part of the New Jerusalem.

The New Jerusalem of the money men, that is, their well-rationalized society of unilateral predation, where they have their own set of rules and hope to hell against fair-play and the civilizing effects of regulation, real competition, without the leg-up they so love.

More, the Moving Target

Another aspect of narcissism is the culture of "more." Do you see the connection? A self lacks definition and so seeks definition through acquisition, as a way of saying "look at this shit, it's what I am." But the acquisitors are also trying to see themselves in the stuff, to get reassurance that they are the person they think they are or hope to be.

Of course it never works. The self has to have some kind of existence independently of the stuff or the stuff could as easily be said to be looking at the self, which is circular, the stuff reflecting on the self and the self on the stuff. There's no static point of reference, just interdependence, and the stuff is tainted by association with the insecure self. 

What did Groucho say about not wanting to belong to any club that would have him? So the insecure self can never be reassured, since it is looking for reassurance in the wrong place. And it has to always have "more" in an attempt to fill up something that is losing ground out the other end because the acquired stuff loses its power and becomes diminished.

The circle must be broken.

Running for the Exits

Occasionally I make the mistake of clicking on a video on YouTube with a title such as: "O'Reilly Gets His Ass Handed to Him." Usually I only watch music videos. The striking thing, besides the not-so-latent aggression and bogus indignation of Bill, is the belief in the rightness of America no matter how we behave. America must be right: always, everywhere, and irrespective of what we do. 

Love it or leave it. But in this virtual world of ours we know who is heading for the exits. You can head for the exits as though it's a video game and over time through technology because your financial self is a kind of avatar. Corporations are people. People are corporations, limited liability entities, with the ability to cross borders in all kinds of inventive ways. The motivation: to avoid taxation.

These self-proclaimed patriots don't think they have any responsibility at all to the society that made it possible. They think the society is the beneficiary and should be grateful that they deign to live here. Well, pardon me. Excuse me for my existence, for interfering with their money-lust, but I think they are the beneficiaries, as Franklin Roosevelt stated as though it were so obvious it couldn't be argued. 

Those who benefit the most are more responsible, in every way. Let me look at my crystal ball. I'm back. The crystal says that if we do the inconceivable, raise taxes to the levels of the fifties and sixties, let's say, when America was in fact great, when we made stuff and acted reasonably intelligently as a nation, O'Reilly and his clan will clog the exits, their virtual, financial selves and maybe bodily.

Be gone. "We the People" will live on and be better off without you.

The Mathical Month-Man

This is a story about what happens when people become part of an equation and hidden assumptions are forgotten or abandoned. Assumptions, I mean, about why productivity matters, why waste is bad, and what we are doing when we work and strive for something.

Work doesn't mean anything if it doesn't relate somehow to human welfare. Otherwise it doesn't matter. It fact it's obscene if all the intelligence and effort and expenditure of resources fail to result in more happiness for more people. That's where we are, though.

We're blowing resources and working our asses off and making rich people richer and nothing else, all to comply with a sick psychology and we're all implicated. All of us, that is, living in the USA.  We need help but of course we think we're better than everyone else. 

That's how it works. Crazy people don't think they're crazy, they think they're right. Normal people don't worry about being right, they want to be happy. Instead of humanizing economics and politics and all the sciences and education we quantify and objectify people. 

We make them into things. I propose that we consider the life of a person, for a month, in reasonably pleasant and satisfying circumstances. It has value and not only for that person. And yet this "month-man" becomes mathematized so that it has no weight. No value. 

There is human suffering underlying all the statistics and lots of confusion. People are frightened and don't understand what has happened. What's happened is that they have been systematically thwarted and disenfranchised, not by conspiracy but by common interest. 

The common interest and application of people who care only about themselves, clearly. I think it will all end in more suffering, the kind of suffering we have brought to other people with our greed, our compulsions, our demand for oil, our demand for drugs and for more stuff.

It has to stop.

Cristo, el Verdadero Amigo

Cristo, el Verdadero Amigo: I saw this on the back of a van and felt the warmth well up in my heart, in a way I never could have in reaction to any of the English translations I can come up with. I hate to think of anyone without a verdadero amigo. It may as well be Cristo. Cristo will not let you down. 

Everyone else can, by dying on you, if in no other way. Maybe in Spanish it's trite to native speakers, I don't know, but the only languages I've begun to learn well enough to sense the nuances in were ancient ones. I could do better in those than in English in getting new understanding and insight.

Take "arête." As a translation "excellence" doesn't cut it. It's an entire concept of culture and appropriateness. Evidently "simpatico" works in that way, comprising an ill-defined world of meaning which is, at the same time, entirely clear in it's fuzziness, being in the realm almost of harmonics.

English to me is so screwed up in this respect: so many words are too concrete and commercialized to be useful. I think English can rock in the macrocosm of writing. It's an incredibly rich language in it's scope, with so many innovations and introductions from interesting places.

And there are multiple strains of Latinate and Romance stuff, roots, particles and words, on top of the Germanic base. Though it's a great language there are problems at the atomic level. "Virtue." That's another reasonable translation of "arête," but it sounds like a whole lot of un-fun.

It also doesn't begin to capture the idea. Let's say we stick with "arête" for now. It's a word in English as well or should be.  I don't think he came up with it but E. F. Schumacher wrote about convergent and divergent problems and the corresponding kinds of thinking needed to address them. 

My fear is that American English has gone all convergent. We want answers, solutions without trade-offs, because we define everything worth having in terms of control and productivity, so it's all about solving problems and durable goods. Fine, but try to show the value of el Verdadero Amigo.

In that arena, or the value of arête. It's pointless. Must everything have an obvious point? For me it's what's worth worrying about, all the divergent things, where there are trade-offs and uncertainties and indescribable aesthetic joys and where there's room for the truth of human inadequacy.

A linguist once told me that to be funny something had to be un-captured by language, somehow elusive of it, so the convergent world of capture and containment is also humorless. Soulless. The convergent world is important. You want bridges not to fall down but soul matters as well.

Even if you can never properly define it or put your finger on it, because it's soul that gets you to sympathy and kindness and, one hopes, perhaps, to el verdadero amigo, the true friend, or maybe true friendship, where one can be simpatico in the world, with happiness and with humor.