AsBjorn

Catholic Bishops Hate You Having Sex

2012-02-15T10:21:00.003-06:00

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the prohibition against sex for fun is really all the Roman Church has left and they are dedicated to enforcing that prohibiton against all logic and rational approach.

The kerfuffle over the President's contraception regulations is entirely about this. The Church's stance against abortion was always much more about punishment then it was ever about the socalled life of the foetus. That was always just something they said to moralize and make people think they occupied a moral high ground. What it was always about is the idea that women who enjoy sex are harlots/sinners/and somehow diseased and deserve the worst to happen to them: You know, having babies. That will force them to give up having sex.

And the more people have babies, the less they will have sex, and the less they have sex, the more they will become controllable, because people don't actually give up sex, they still have it, but if they perceive it as sin, then they become guilty and fodder for the collection plate.

The anti-sex version of xtianity is dying, whether it knows it or not. Birth control and family planning are killing the version of the Jesus story that Paul built.

And let me quote Andrew Sullivan here:

If you really oppose abortion, you should back contraception, especially for those women least likely to afford it outside health insurance plans. But the new rigid fundamentalism of the John Paul II and Benedict XVI hierarchy cannot allow such moral trade-offs. But trading off the rape of children for the reputation of the church? Suddenly they get pragmatic.

I'm sorry but I find the protectors of child rapists preaching to women about contraception to be a moral obscenity. When all the implicated bishops and the Pope resign, ther replacements will have standing to preach.

Amen to that. Did you see the word he used? Fundamentalism. That defines the roman church as it exists today. Stupid and closed minded and an institution that despises the female.

May the Lady grant them the grace to find their way to Her before their end forces them to that painful crossing over that is the confrontation with the Feather of Truth. Their's will be the true meaning of hell, the recognition that their own lies created so much needless pain.

Obama, 2012.

Uh, Contraceptives? Its Really About Money

2012-02-08T13:05:00.002-06:00

so the Catholic Bishops are complaining that the Obama Administration's rule, that companies/organizations have to provide the health insurance benefit that pays for their employees contraceptive needs because the Roman Church says that all contraception is immoral and fucks with God's reasons for allowing us to make beautiful love. Namely, its all about the babies. So, why should they be forced to pay for someone else's health costs when it violates this basic tenet of their's???

But, secretly, behind this, is the knowledge that if they don't have to pay for it they can keep the money their competitors will have to pay out. In other words, this is clearly a grab for a better deal at their competitors' expense. Catholic hospitals have always pushed to use their "religious" basis as an excuse to get more and keep more of the funds that prop up the medical world.

The Bishops don't like anything that scews with their revenue flow. And they don't like anything that admits that most people have average sex lives. Joy is the one thing that bureacratic cathlicism really really doesn't like.

But the Bishops, they do like the money fine. And, face it, they need a lot more of it because they had to pay out so much for all the child molestation suits they have faced in the last twenty years.

But, when it comes to women's health, they don't give a good goddamn about that. And when they die and cross over and confront that feather of truth thing, that will be the end of them. That truth will scorch their sad little souls and they will squeal with excuses and they will try to define things in such a way that their own iniquity isn't the central jewel in that crown they will wear in their own devised hell.

Once again, you heard it here first folks: This anti-contraceptive thing is all about the money.

The roman catholic church is one of the most corrupt institutions on the earth. Why people let it run their lives is one of those things that remind you that most people's lives are run by their conditioning. Take away the conditioning and give all the people the same broad knowledge and there would be significantly less catholics in the world.

As it is, most actual catholics, those who pay the bills and attend mass, they believe the Church should pay for their contrceptives, and they almost all of them use contraceptives. It is one of those things, the real world has different rules than the ecclasiastical world. All those old men in the Vatican are pretty much completely removed from life as it is lived by most human beings.

I thank the Lady for my freedom from the lies of my youth. Catholic school from kindergarten through the twelfth grade, and catholic college. But, my mind was always my own. And I read from all around the world. It took me forty years to find something approaching truth. That is the Lady's mercy. And Her infinite love.

Rick Santorum Wants You to Put Your Dick Away

2012-02-08T11:02:00.003-06:00

Now I am just sitting here, thinking about thinking. I enjoyed the fact that Rick Santorum won all three contests yesterday. I really enjoyed the fact that voter turnout was abysmal, that the Republican enthusiasm factor is beginning to wilt. Santorum is just an weird guy who wants to control peoples' sex lives. I don't see how that could be a winner in today's america, but what do I know? I think he'd bee a pretty evil president and would guarantee a big war in the middle east. He's an Israel Firster, and he thinks we should bomb Iran. Look for really bad economic times under a Santorum presidency.

On the other hand, is it possible for him to get to the nomination? Romney has all the Money and the organization. In the next two contests, Arizona and Michigan, Romney will money bomb Santorum, like he did the Newster in Florida. Ron Paul finished second in Minnesota, ahead of Romney. Its a wild ride for sure. I did like what somebody wrote online today about Paul, that his support is really from kids who want their pot legalized and who thinks Ron is the great peace advocate, when he's really just against spending money on the military. He would be a nightmare president, maybe worse than Santorum.

And the Mittster, who used to play close to Obama in the polls is now slipping into darkness. O has a 7% lead in the most recent, and O's favorabilities have gone up five points while Mittster's have fallen 17. Wonder what the money boys in the Repug back rooms are thinking now. Wonder what the Koch Brothers think they have bought.

And I read that Obama is seeking big money for his PAC (that he said he would never have, but must've realized they would carpet bomb him if he didn't get a hydrogen bomb of his own) from the guy who owns the Power Rangers franchise, a current fave of my daughter's. I think Bill Gates ought to just sign up to give O a billion of his spare dollars. That would seem worth it to me to keep us out of any new wars. I think any of the Repubs is likely to drag us into a big war in the M.E. With disastrous consequences for the price of gas and for the economy in general.

Economically speaking the most conservative thing you can do is vote for Obama. Any of the Republicans is likely to blow the building up. And that is not an overstatement.

I thank the Lady for Her mercy. "If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn/they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem."

Republican President Means the End of A Woman's Right to Choose and Probably the End of a Woman's Right to Procure Contraception

2012-02-07T11:16:00.004-06:00

Politics on the right continues to be a slapstick movie version of reality. It looks like Santorum might just take Minnesota away from the glorious front runner, Senor Romney, the Mexican Mormon. Romney leads in Colorado, amongst the Mormons and skiers there. But Missouri is a tossup and perhaps Santorum will sweep up some of the Missouri rightwing catholics. Santorum is one of those catholic guys that I learned to hate in my years enduring the Church. Sanctimonius and desperate, absolutely desperate, to be "right" about everything. They are sad creatures these types who stagger through life desperate to force everybody else to be like them. When in reality they don't really want to be like themselves. But they can't admit that because they'd have to admit their lives are entirely devoted to whining.

Romney came out today and said the Komen fund's huge error in de-funding Planned Parenthood was the right thing to do. As usual Mitt is running well behind the story on the ground. The vice pres at Komen who promoted this action resigned today. She is gone and Komen has backtracked on the whole thing, but it is too too late. They screwed up big time. Now millions of people who used to give money to Komen know just how flawed an organization it is. How little of their money actually makes it to cancer care and research. They can't put that noise back in the bottle. Me, and lots of folks just like me, now know better than to take the pink ribbon seriously. No more. No more runs, walks, or contributions. Somebody else will sweep us this money and hopefully use it better than these people.

But Romney coming out, on the wrong side of this issue, points out something that everybody should pay attention to: If any of these Republicans are elected President of the United States they almost certainly will end women's right to seek a safe and legal abortion in the United States. It is pretty much one of the few things you can count on these guys to do, across the board. Even the libertarian goyourownway guy, Ron Paul, is completely on record as being utterly opposed to a woman's right to abortion.

That's right. A Republican President this time will probably get to appoint two Supreme Court justices in the next four years. They will only appoint judges that will vote their way on this issue. It is the central issue for the Religious Right. They will demand it of any Republican. And a Republican legislature will do all it can to re-enslave women and their sexuality.

Vote Republican and end abortion rights for all. That's what this election will really come down to. And after abortion, they will then seek to control women's ability to get contraceptives. These folks are against the normal sex lives that people lead today.

If you believe you should control your sex life, you cannot vote for the Republican party. Once you do that you have given them the power to destroy your life in its most intimate theatre.

But, if the Komen debacle demonstrates anything to the powers that really rule this country, it should be that if they destroy abortion and contraception rights there really will be an enormous effect. It will be an outcry that will last for years and that will destroy many peoples careers. And I think it is not too much to say that it really will destroy the Republican Party once and for all. The repercussions will go on and on.

Few people read this. Too bad. But I'm just putting it out here now for someone to find. Voting Republican means ending a woman's right to choose and a woman's right to choose to have safe sex. Rick Santorum is only the most explicit, but they all actually do believe that women who have sex should be punished, especially with the punishment of pregnancy.

I ask for the Lady's mercy for us all. Right at the moment I don't have the ability to forgive these twerps for what they are proposing. They will have a lot to answer for on the other side.

Romney's Mormon Followers, Cults Arising!

2012-02-02T11:54:00.003-06:00

The horse race as it exists here on Ground Hog Day, 2012: Romney set to overwhelm the Nevada caucuses by bringing in the other adherents to his cult: Mormons plan to vote for Romney at like 95%+. This means he will win Nevada by probably 20% over Gingrich. This is not unexpected. The western states that caucus are good for the Mormon Rich Guy, and for the Crazy Grandpa who is working hard at setting his son up for the next go around.

Yes, I think Ron Paul is now all about Rand, whatever he may say. He is all about power and money and I have come to believe that a lot of his riff, though he is convinced of it, he understands he will never see any of it come to pass. It was all a shill, like the racism in his newsletters, to get him money and power and let him rise in the aristocracy that he clearly believes is the real basis for government. I see that he and Romney and their wives have become great buddies since the 2008 race. One has to wonder if Romney isn't perfectly capable of bringing Paul aboard as his Veep candidate. It has a symmetry to it. He would solidify all the Paul possibles out there and get some serious energy going in campus world, hitherto ceded to the Obama campaign. I think it is more than a real possibility.

Still, what happens to the Neutered Newt at the end of this travesty? When he goes back on Fox Faux News and opens his big trap, what will come out of it? If Mitt loses, and that seems likely as no one but no one is warming up to the little shit, then Newt is playing for the "I knew it all along" crowd and he will attempt to use that fact to be THE spokesperson for the wounded conservative idiots.

It should make for a fun convention, unless the Romneys and the regular Repubs have nailed it all down before it takes place. Frankly it is going to be an awful year and an awfully long year.

The only truly optimistic thing I can say is that time will pass no matter what happens. I just hope we aren't at war with Iran in August. Then the grandiosity of Republican politics will turn hard into the John Wayne movie theatre of the mind and thousands of extras will have to die so the men can be men. And what of Obama? If the Iranians are forced to a desperate act, then he will have to do what he will have to do. Americans are sick of war, but they sure as hell don't want some ludicrous little regime to get away with anything. It just goes against the Super Bowl narrative.

And, speaking of the Superbowl, my people are all in/from New Hampshire. They are Patriots fans. I'm for the Pats this year because, let's face it, we all hate New York sports teams for buying up the talent and being consecutive winners. But I'm more for the Pats because they stomped that foolish and probably hypocritical Qb of the Colorado team, who insisted that god must be involved since he had so many close ones. John 3:16 that motherfucker. I quite enjoyed seeing him destroyed by New England. It's that holier than thou shit that really pisses one off.

Meantime, thanks to the Lady Brigid, again, for the beginnings of another spring. The world lives, loves, and dies, in a rondelay played through the days. This is the very hymn of mercy, if we can only hear it.

Wednesday Post Mortem

2012-02-01T12:09:00.002-06:00

It is indeed Wednesday and I have crap to do later. Meanwhile the Mittster has kicked the Newt in the seat of his spacious pants. Will this be it? Now will we have to listen to months and months of paid for by rich republicans ads excoriating the President with lie after lie? I am afraid the level of crap on tv will become ever more widespread as the Mittster's minions do "whatever it takes" to get their robot into the White House so that the re-serfing of western civilization can continue apace.

Truly this next election will be a choice: give up and let the rich put us into the corrals of the lower middle class (and by us, I mean everyone but them), or fight back and try and obviate the corporate realms hold on most physical aspects of being. Americans (and really most humans) just love a good apacolypse scenario. We just plain like the drama. It makes us feel important to live in the "end times". So, I think you will hear a bunch of people blithering on about that, while the underground rattle will be the 2012 Mayan calender thing. Or is it Aztec? I haven't been keeping up with the nutcase reality of late.

Well, at least we won't have Callista for First Lady. She is kind of Barbie Doll like isn't she? I don't have a mental picture of Mitt's wife, but she is probably in the Laura Bush school of first wifery. She and Mitt had a bunch of kids. There is that story about the dog riding on the roof of the car for 12 hours. I read today that back when his sons said the dog ran away after that, but the Mittster says the dog lived to a ripe old age and died in his arms, crying softly that he wanted to see the White House.

This being the 1st of February, I ask the Lady Bridget (which I will pronounc Breed, as they did back in the day) for the mercy of an early Spring. It is Imbolc, the ewes begin lactating, in advance of giving birth. The world that lives continues on its fiery wheel. What Kerouac called "the quivering meat wheel of conception." He was anxious to get off that wheel, but I choose to stay in the game, riding the circle for yet another year. Thanks to the Lady, for Her love and for Her mercy.

President of Doom: Newt Gingrich

2012-01-23T13:06:00.003-06:00

They changed the software at blogger and I don't think much of the new stuff. Here I am typing away but it isn't very comfortable. Not that anyone out there cares about the physical process.

This is all comes down, this week, to the recognition that Newt Gingrich as President would truly be the end of the American Dream. His ability to fuck us all over royally, for the sake of his own ego, is already pretty clear.

I think Newt Gingrich would probably mean war in the middle east. He certainly would try and turn the Supreme Court into an even more rightwing group than it is now. And there's that business about space. I imagine Newt has a private vision of putting nuclear bomb tipped missiles in orbit around the earth and then calling the shots, all in the name of "peace" and "security", not to mention "capitalism" and "democracy."

Part of me seriously wonders if the mainstream Republicans, tthose that are not batshit crazy, will have Newt "taken care of" during the next few months. In any case, they will then be stuck with Mitt Romney, the weakest presidential candidate since Michael Dukakis. But Mitt still gives the illusion he could be president.

What about Santorum, you say? The guy is against people using birth control. He loses on the national stage.

And Ron Paul? He is perceived as a crank. Thanks national press corps. Is he? Well, truth be told he is a crank. I don't think the electorate could really feel safe voting for him, even though he looks like Grandpa and doesn't care if pot is legalized. Where Paul is important though is that he understands that we all hate war. Maybe not the neo-cons, all six or eight thousand of them. But everybody else hates war. Particularly those sent to fight it.

May the Lady's mercy bring reason back to the Republican party. It is sad that the party of Lincoln has come to this. I thank the Lady for Her love. I am grateful for Her mercy.

Ignoring Ron Paul

2012-01-12T10:56:00.002-06:00

Things get more fabulous every day here in the land of pretend. I watch the Republican primaries this season and shake my head in disbelief. They say so many things that simply don't match the reality. Yet, we are supposed to take seriously the idea that one of them could run the government?

So Mitt carpet bombed Newt in Iowa, back when people were taking Newt seriously there. Before xmas. So no Newt is carpet bombing Mitt in South Carolina. And New Hampshire didn't change a thing. The good burgers of Republicanism in NH came out for the candidate of the rich guys and the plutocrats, Mittster. The interesting tidbit of Republicanism is the rise of Ron Paul.

But the men who own the mainstream media do not care for Ron Paul at all, so he is either ignored or villified. I myself think Ron Paul is not the sainted Ghandhi figure his followers believe, but I can't help but wonder how the media can ignore the hearts of litereally millions of Americans when it comes to the good Doctor.

Sure he's a closet racist, and sure he's a fruitcake when it comes to economics. If he were President what could he really do? A lot of damage and not much good. But wouldn't it be fun? That's the apocalypse folks speaking. Still, the things that make Ron Paul important are easy: He is against stupid wars and maybe most wars and certainly he is against spending so damn much money on the war machine. And two, he is actually always speaking in a way that stays true to his beliefs, no matter how inane they are. People like that because he doesn't appear to pander.

However, his real record is rife with inconsistencies, so we can adjudge him an actual human being, after all. And not a saint, nor a grandfatherly figure who will make everything better.

What is ultimately going on in the land of Ron Paul/I'm #2!, is that he is a stalking horse for his son, Rand Paul. I think he believes that whoever runs this year will lose to Obama and that in 2016 his son, the senator from Kentucky, will have a decent run at a realistic chance for the nomination of the Republicans. For Paul's supporters come from the ranks of the young and bitter and they will only increase as the years go by.

No matter what Obama succeeds in accomplishing in his second term, things are just not going to be as good as the 90s ever again. And that is really what people are judging against. The 90s of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. If the Republicans hadn't wasted two years on the laughable impeachment, things could have been made even better. Though perhaps that isn't so. It was under Clinton that the Wall Street boys tossed out most of the rules to keep them in line. The etymology of the crash of '08 goes back to the Clinton years/and the Gingrich years.

In any case I am not a Ron Paul fan, having seen a video of him talking about the Civil War and getting the history of it very wrong. But I think his is an important candidacy and that his success should be taken by the establishment repugs as a warning bell, ringing loud and clear.

Things are going to change.

But, isn't the Republican race for the nomination so funny as to make you laugh until you cry?

The Lady brings us Her mercy. May this life continue on for many more turns of the wheel.

Christopher Hitchens, Gone

2011-12-16T16:57:00.002-06:00

The honest critic is always a friend of those who seek the truth. Hitchens, speaking truth as he knew it.

Hitch, at his best. Gone today, for what reason? None that I can see, but the universe always has its own logic.

The only fucking thing that counts is the truth. Try and remember that. He did.

Newt Gingrich: Winning!

2011-12-14T10:42:00.003-06:00

More strangeness in America. So, it is starting to look like Newt Gingrich will be the Republican nominee for the office of President. Either that or there will be some sort of maniacal fight to the death in the primaries. But who do the crazy rightwingers actually want? There really is nobody who can be what they desire, because what they desire is fantasy. A fiction.

The facts in the real world will eventually destroy this strange version of conservative politics that exists now. It was largely created by the Fat Man, Rusty Limbaugh, and that purveyor of rumor that supports my vision of the world, Rupert Murdoch. They will both have a lot of true pain when they cross over, being forced to actually face what they have wrought and the pain it has created in the world. So it goes. Let 'em eat that cake, while they're here. Soon enough they will face their own lies.

But, once again, Newt Gingrich? He's fat, he's fatuous, he's all over the map. If he is President, what will that mean? For one thing he's said he'll make Crazy Johnny Bolten our Sec State. He'll follow Hillary Clinton, one of the great ones in history, with a man who will piss off the rest of the world at a time when we are trying to create a safer more democratic world.

Short answer: Gingrich equals major war, probably in the middle east. Gingrich equals much higher fuel prices, much worse unemployment. It should be extremely frightening in America. I'm kind of thinking, how cold can Canada be??

The upside for the Newt Nomination is that the comedians will reap a bounty of funniness. Newt is one of those people that other people all recognize and can be so easily parodied because he has often parodied himself. It should be a clear case of "winning!"

Maybe he'll make Charlie Sheen his vice president. He probably will need someone with a working dick to service Callista baby in the WH, while the Newter destroys our civilization.

Explanations for Tea & Consequences

2011-12-06T10:35:00.003-06:00

Pieces of things from today's web:

This is from a comment regarding the Tea Party:

They didn't care about "government spending" when we were starting wars. They didn't care about the deficit when congress was putting tax breaks for the rich on the government credit card. They didn't care about "small government" and "freedom" when the Patriot Act was written. But when the black democrat was inaugurated, it was suddenly, "I want my country back!"

and this if from Political Animal

Last week, Nick Hanauer, a very successful venture capitalist, urged policymakers to raise his taxes, make public investments, and get some money in the pockets of middle-class consumers. Warren Buffett, among the country’s most successful billionaires, has said largely the same things. A recent survey found that 68% of millionaires nationwide want to see their own taxes go up.

And Pat Garofalo flags this gem from Morgan Stanley Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat, who believes the growing class gap is a problem in need of addressing.

“The wealthiest can afford to pay more in taxes. That’s a part of the deal. That makes sense. I don’t know anyone that doesn’t agree with that,” Porat said. “The wealth disparity between the lowest and the highest continues to expand, and that’s inappropriate.” “We cannot cut our way to greatness,” she added.

So, who are these doofuses that would destroy us to regain some imagined past? Who are these people, mainly older white men, their short dickedness all too apparent. And what can we do about them?

Eventually the latinos will have taken over the southern states that form a lot of the repub electoral base. But this won't happen for ten years. It is a little too possible that if the socalled conservatives retain the kind of veto over government that they have now that there simply won't be much left for the coming hispanic majority to do. We will have been reduced to second world status by the very people who claim to idolize the constitution and the founders. Yay America!

But, as long as these folks have football to watch and young people to disapprove of they will be content on their couches, watching the demise of the greatest nation to ever exist and nodding how it wasn't their fault when it of course was only their fault.

Lady have mercy on these weak fellows, incapable of a woody now, palin-less in their grief.

Cain Is Gone, Newt Is Ready for a New Wife: America!

2011-11-29T13:38:00.002-06:00

How very lax I have been this season. It is almost December. The Iowa Caucuses are only moments away, as the crow flies. I knew Herman Cain was never real. The interesting fact was that he polled well there for awhile. Of course most of the racist voters that would tell someone on the telephone they were for him would never have voted for him. Now they can just say he was an ignorant of the world loser who pursued women. Bye bye Godfather of Pizza Man. You were never gonna be the one.

Now we have Newt Gingrich. This is America's hope for a truly fascistic regime. Newt is dedicated to creating a broad, legal underclass of Americans that can be used for fodder for business and the for the Imperial Army that he hopes to create. Though where he will get the money for the endeavour nobody knows.

And Newt is an evil little shithead who thinks he is so darn special. It will be fun to see him and Obama spar in the debates. I wonder what wonder he will foist off on us as Vice President? Maybe Huckabee? Surely not Santorum. Actually Santorum as Veep would create the situation where nobody would want harm to come to Newt. Santorum as President would be like bringing back those people that ran the Salem Witch Trials.

In any case the Republican Primary season is around the corner and it is going to be extremely entertaing. Or not. It is still possible that Romney will roll the dice and spend the money and wrap it right up. If he can win the caucus in Iowa and then take New Hampshire all he has to do is finish second in South Carolina. And no matter what else Mitt is, he is the choice of the republican old guard. And perhaps he has the best chance against Barack Obama.

But the truth of the matter is that "who knows?" Many things may come to pass before we get to next summer. Let us all hope that the worst thing that happens is only that the Republicans nominate some scary loser for president. I suspect other things will happen along the way that nobody will like.

Will the effing crazy fascist f-cks in Israel actually start World War III by bombing Iran? Will those same people exclude women from the public square because, it turns out, they are religiously crazier than the Mullahs?? Don't blink, that is actually being discussed in Tel Aviv as I write this.

Will Pakiston decide to take Kashmir the old fashioned way, Nuclear Bomb? will Europe descend into a new Depression thanks to the Bankers on both ends?

Do you ever feel like an ant, about to be crushed by a large creature who has no idea you are even there?

Cain, in Defeat

2011-10-31T11:39:00.003-05:00

Herman Cain has had multiple failures that would have done in a more normal candidate, but he holds his 25-30% in spite of all the mainstreamers and the regular republicans can throw at him. Yet, that 1 of 3 republican votes mostly just establishes that the tea partiers are happy to have a black man that they can support now to show they are the racists everyone knows they actually are. The fact is that when the primaries start happening, and push comes to shove, a lot of those people are not going to vote for a black man, even one as clearly an oreo as this guy. Clarence Thomas himself could not get within ten percentage points of a majority of the Tea Party. There's a reason for that. A reason we are all actually quite clear on.

But having Herman around to confuse the regular people is quite fun. His sins in the 1990s are now coming to light, and it looks like he's broken a bunch of campaign finance laws. And he doesn't have any ground operations in Iowa and New Hampshire.

So, Romney won't win Iowa, but he will win New Hampshire, but it won't be a blowout win. Still he'll do okay in Nevada. But who wins Iowa now that our girl Michelle has come apart? Will it be Rickety Rick Perry, scoping the possibility of rising from the ashes of his weird candidacy? Who was it who talked him into running in the first place? He had his nice little kingdom that didn't stress his clearly limited intellectual resources. Why he would want to be pres must be all about the benjamins. Some rich guys are trying to get him to run a government that he actually hates. Perfect for the grover norquist types out there.

But what if Herman wins Iowa? Its a caucus state. I don't think that can actually happen, unless people there just hate the regular repubs so much that they want to fuck everything up as much as possible.

It really is too bad Sarah took herself out of this movie. It would've been pretty funny to see Mitt scramble when she rolls through the Iowa Caucuses and when she massacres him in South Carolina. Now, who knows what will stop the tepid train from rolling into the nomination station? Looks like the Plastic Mormon will be the opposition, come this time next year.

It really is a shame, but there is no actual conversation going on about what we are gonna do. Which means we probably are not gonna do anything. Welcome to the cardboard playhouse of the stupid rich.

They built this structure by competing with each other for who could hold the most marbles in their bowels. Pretty soon all that offal will carry them to the bottom of time's sea. There they will discover that it was all something of a hoax. Herman will be there, laughing his ass off and having a cigarette with his campaign manager.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth, Obama will be trying to negotiate a way out of the stupidity. Will we understand that in the nick of time?

It was the Band who said, "you can't raise a Cain back up when he's in defeat", The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

"Why We March"

2011-10-18T09:10:00.003-05:00

We march for three simple things: tighter regulation of the financial industry (a return to Glass-Steagall would be a big step), a demand for shared sacrifice amongst *100%* of this country, and to wake up those in Congress who have been listening only to the lobbyists and the media chattering classes, and losing sight of the fact that this country is a DEMOCRACY, of the people, by the people, and for the people.

These are not radical notions, and they're not even strictly left-wing (personal responsibility seems like a classic conservative belief to me). This is the no-longer silent majority in this country, across the spectrum, who have finally had enough.

This is from Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish, yesterday's column. It was sent in by an unidentified reader from the West Coast.

I have to say this to the well off: You think you deserve everything, but ultimately the human animal is a herd animal and you had better be part of the herd, or you will be cut out and slaughtered. Remember the French Revolution. Way more people are armed in the United States of America now. You think you'll be safe, but the kind of safety you will have to buy will diminish everything about the world for you.

hoc est enim corpus mei

2011-10-14T13:01:00.001-05:00

Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn’t serve anyone, and it’s painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you’re magnifying the person you lost... Patti Smith

Herman Cain and the Civil Rights Movement; Sarah P., the Grifter

2011-10-07T12:41:00.003-05:00

Current questions:

Why did Herman Cain not participate in the Civil Rights Movement when he was a college student, 1963-1968? Was he terrified of getting hurt? Was he trying as hard as he could to be a good "n*"? As so many southern black folk in that time were. Was he following his Daddy's advice, to avoid making a stance. In his autobiography he tells us his dad told him to go sit in the back of the bus, and he did it.

In other words a perfect Republican Negro. Just what they need to make them feel all fuzzy about how not bigoted they are. Not like the rest of the black folk, who speak their own language and have a different culture than us proper middle class white folks, all yearning to be rich entrepreneurs and explode those dumb enough to have to work for minimum wage.

Herman tells us he is going to change taxes to 9% on sales, corporate, and personal income tax. You think we have a deficit problem now? And putting that sales tax on every thing means the poor and middle class will carry far more of the burden then they do now. That'll superfire the economy.

When are the Republicans and the business lobby going to understand that if they don't hire people and pay them there will be no consumers to drive the economy? I suppose they are counting on China allowing them to sell their stuff to the downtrodden chinese citizenry. I don't think they understand that those people who run China are going to insist on making most of the money and that when they can steal the tech and make it themselves they will kick out the western companies. Too bad.

But Republican stupidity is really just everywhere now. It is the map of reality that Eric Cantor believes in, despite all evidence. These people run things because america has betrayed itself and voted them into office.

What will happen when they win and things get progressively worse? Who will the voters blame? Will they ever look at themselves?

What else, today?

Sarah's not running. It turns out she's just another shyster, taking money from the marks. She may believe that god wants her to be president, but she's not got the courage to actually try and do it. She's betraying her own theology here. But most people look at her and see a bad, tasteless joke. She and her family, her poor stupid children, being used and manipulated. She's a joke. McCain owes us all for that one. And though she will fade, there will always be a level of doubt about any Republican, from now on.

Party First. That's what they really believe. Screw america, we only support those who are just like us, republican and white or oreos like Cain. And as far as the mexicans go, there are a couple of okay ones, but most of the beaners can go right back to Mexico and take their drug addled kiddies with them.

Party First. That's what McCain should've said, if he had been an honest broker. Rush Limbaugh is at least honest about this. He said they had to destroy Obama because he could not abide a "N*" in the White House. And Rusty hates Michelle, because let's face it, he would never be man enough for a woman like that. And really, the real question about Rusty (and I know someone who went to high school with him, so I know that that is a legitimate knickname for the man) is, is he really gay? Does he really have kiddie porn? Those are the rumors.

Surely no one will ever know the truth of these things. That is, until they die and discover that that is how the universe actually works. When we pass over to the other, greater side of being, beyond the simple physical universe of these five dimensions, the first thing that happens is you get confronted with the actual truth of being, whatever it is. Starting with the things you told yourself that were actually lies but that you required yourself to believe them for reasons of ego and fear. Rusty is in for one big honking dark time. And everyone of us who passes will also know his truth and our own.

That'd be why I try to be truthful with myself. I know I am going to be confronted with it after I have passed on. I am looking forward to knowing some "unknowable" truths. Like who really killed John Kennedy, if there was a conspiracy. And who manipulated the 2000 election. And what is really going on in side Clarence Thomas' mind. There's a man who has a lot to answer for in himself.

Anyway, I am grateful for the Lady Arianrhod's love and especially for Her mercy this October day. Life goes one for me, for the present time. I am grateful for every second of every day. We all should be, even when things are dark. She provides us with hope. She is hope itself.

Where Are the Republican Solutions? Nowhere, Apparently

2011-09-28T11:22:00.004-05:00

Not to be snotty, but where the eff are the ideas from the Republicans? All I can hear is that reduce/get rid of taxes and reduce/get rid of regulations. Make it so business can do whatever they want.

Didn't the Republicans do this during the Bush years? Was there real prosperity from that? Where are those jobs now? Didn't the lack of regulation allow the banks and wall street to do whatever they wanted and to nearly destroy us in 2008? I remember that George Bush's presidency had trouble adding jobs to the economy.

If that is their only prescription, then we are in serious trouble, as it is clear that they won't support anything President Obama will sign off on.

There was a time when the country came first for our politicians. That is apparently not true any more. Rush Limbaugh made this the dominant meme of our time: Let's destroy this President. Let's make him fail. Never mind what it does to our economy and our country. The most important thing is getting that black man out of the white house.

If there ever was a human male who exhibited his own self loathing so obviously as Rush does I can't think of who that might be. This guy is terrified of black men and very clearly is aware at heart that Barack Obama is his superior in every way. Thus the desperate need to destroy him.

And the Republicans, they are all of this cast now. The need to destroy what this country is is paramount. And do they even think of how it will after they have done these things? Do they think how we will manage to scrape together a civilization after they have ruined this one?

Nah. They don't care. They think if we just let it all happen according to Ron Paul's simplistic liberatarianism that everything will work out. And then, of course, we'll have the kind of world we had before the new deal. Many more poor, especially old people. Many millions of Americans dying because of lack of health care.

And isn't that what this boils down to? Who are the americans? Who are the people who make up this, once the greatest country in the world? We already know that Sara Palin doesn't think I live in a real part of America (Illinois, blue state). We also know she doesn't think that chicanos in Texas are really Americans, no more than Black folk in Watts.

What did she say when Obama finally defeated Hillary Clinton for the nomination in 2008? It is reported that at the diner she frequented, she came in and said, "So the Nigger beat the Bitch." And the Tea Partiers worship this woman. Welcome to the tattered remnants of a great society. Reagan would throw up a little in his mouth if he had to defend her (11th commandment, speak no ill of a fellow republican). As a matter of fact, Reagan would be a democrat today, in the face of all this madness.

Resistance is futile, but it's all that I've got.

Grace: Words on Living in My Family

2011-09-28T10:46:00.003-05:00

Late in the day. That's how I see my life. Sinatra sings "It Was a Very Good Year." I know that is a smarmy number, reducing women to the male experience of his own life. Yet, it is one's own life that you do try to understand and judge. And, in my life, as in the narrator of that song's life, the romantic experience is the deciding factor. That which I see when I look back.

Part of that is, of course, the failure of my attempts to write novels and poems. I have no audience, few publications, and essentially no understanding of why it worked out that way. I've numerous friends who write who have told me that I do it well. And I have also been told the stories I have to tell are interesting. So, I have little sense of why nobody in serious literature ever gave me the time of day. Most of the pieces I have ever sent out in my life have come back, clearly unread.

But, never mind that now. It is late in my day. Things will still happen to me I will still think and read and even write the occasional poem. I miss having friends who wished to share discourse, but in some ways that is okay. I'm very bad at argument. I give in, I leave. I'm not interested in defending my positions, although I suppose if anyone ever commented to this blog, I would be happy to try and explain my reasoning.

Its the contest that I just don't do. I don't like contests and when forced into them I generally bag it and lose as soon as possible. What does that mean?

In relation to the initial subject of this post, it means I had romantic relationships, but when they became any kind of contest I tended to fold my tent and creep away. I'm just not a competitor. Why not I wonder. Part of me knows that it is that my ego is really very fragile. I think that comes from all the years knowing that I never quite managed to live up to my mother's expectations.

So I don't tend to go anywhere that I might be shown, once again, to be a shallow, stupid loser. As my brother Greg characterized me, the last time we ever had a real conversation before he abandoned me entirely in the 1970s.

As far as my family goes, very occasionally I speak with my sister, Dianne. She lives in Michigan and has the life she has. We used to be closer, in the 1990s. But George W.'s presidency pretty much squelched that. Anyway, she is an okay person who has struggled in her life and who seems mainly fairly truthful. She herself is married to a man who also has a fragile ego; something that is a problem when we have been in the same room. That's okay. He's been good to my sister. That is enough.

I exchange emails and the very occasional phonecall with my brother, David, the psych prof who lives in Arkansas. He too seems to be trying to live a truthful life now, but much of his life was spent living with my parents and having a kind of secret life. We all do have secret lives. His was perhaps more extreme than most, due to living with his mother and father as they aged and fell into infirmity. Nonetheless, he appears to have rescued himself from that cul de sac in Wichita, Kansas. Now he lives in Arkansas and teaches at a small college. I speak with him some and he has gone out of his way to support me and to support my daughter Paige. He is essentially the only one in my family to appear to give much of a rat's ass about any of my children.

My other siblings I do not speak to or talk with or email or have even much of an idea as to whether they are alive. They have both made it clear that they dislike me and they also both fear that I want money from them. My brother Greg, who I was under the illusion that we were close when we were children, is a tax lawyer who lives in Hollywood. In a normal family the fact that my own child, my daughter, is living in Los Angeles and working there, would be something I would communicate to my brother, and ask him to perhaps check on her. But this brother, Gregory Mark Osburn, would only rebuff any such suggestion and then he would complain to my sisters that I was trying to get money from him. He himself has a child, a daughter named Molly, who I am told doesn't speak with him any more.

My other sibling is my sister, Kathy Cown Shepherd. She teaches at a small private college in California. She may be retired now for all I know. She was always something of a bitch, but as she aged it got considerably worse. Here's what she's like: Cheap, snotty, self-important, a major league whiner. She became a nasty phony person. And she made herself that. I know this because at one time I lived in the same city she did and was much closer to her. She was difficult for me though, because she was so embarrassing to be around. I was a complete freak in those days and my sister Kathy was like the kid pretending to know what is going on so she can be with the cool kids. The sixties and seventies were about authenticity. And it is that that Kathy doesn't have.

In any case, she's been a royal bitch to me throughout most of my life. I have the letters to prove it. But I suppose she's given me more attention than my brother Greg. When I got married in 1999, I sent them both invitations to the wedding (which was in New Hampshire). I didn't expect them to come, or to even acknowledge the invitation. But they both asked my sister Dianne if I had done that because I was trying to get presents out of them.

Kathy then sent back an rsvp, addressed to my fiance, saying she might come. Which made me panic. I was like, how do I explain this awful person to my wonderful new in-laws? I knew that she would make my family look truly awful and I told Dianne that if Kathy did come, she had to keep her from embarrassing us. Later that night Dianne called me and told me she had gone online and discovered that there was no way Kathy could fly to NH from California and stay in a motel room for less than at least a thousand dollars. Then we both started laughing, knowing Kathy would never spend that kind of money on doing something with either one of us.

What a life. I just wonder what my father really thought about us. He was good with Kathy. So how did she turn out to be so two faced and greedy? Dianne says that Kathy took the brunt of Mother's madness. And I think that is probably the explanation. Margaret Buckley Osburn, my mother, meant well, but was driven by terrible insecurity. The needs of her ego were massive, and since she herself couldn't really meet them, she expected her children to go out and get her all the ego rewards she required to feel like she had some meaning. This pretty much destroyed all of our lives in one way or another. I myself have worked hard not to do this to my children. But who can say how successful I have been at any of this?

I know, for instance, that my son, Joel the architect and computer manager, thinks that am a phony and am critical in a very specific fashion. My daughter in LA once wrote a piece about visiting him in Oregon, with me and my wife, and it was very critical of me and had them laughing at me together. She had it posted on Deviant Art for a long time, where I had posted various pieces of minor erotica (since removed), and I stumbled across it at one point. Talk about learning things from your kids. That was a great lesson. I wish I could say that I'm not "like that" anymore, but even today I find myself doing and saying things that I recognize as typifying that kind of behaviour. And I do it with my third child. You'd think I would be better at this point. And maybe I'm a little better.

But it truly all does go back to my mother and the complexity of her time on this earth. In some ways she was supportive of me. But to this day I feel like I have let her down. And in some ways I feel I have let down all the women I have been associated with. I know for a fact that at least three of them expected me to do much better as a writer and that they all have held that against me along the way. I'm really basically a big disappointment. To myself, to my lovers, to my children.

well. It is late in the day, folks. I still struggle for meaning and for truth. I still hope to get somewhere, writing these dusty pieces that no one ever reads. I am grateful to the Lady for Her love and for Her mercy. I have great progeny and a wife who is herself clearly a gift from the Lady. I am not suffering and know that suffering is not a path to righteousness. In these words I am looking for grace. Grace. That's my reason for living.

Republicans and Penis Size: Why They Really Hate Barack Obama

2011-09-16T10:16:00.002-05:00

Well, the Republicans have always relentlessly marched us in the direction of fascism. That was true forty years ago, and it is true now. And the democrats are true leftists: they can't all be in the same boat at the same time without arguing about who's turn it is to paddle. I've always known nice people in Kansas and Oklahoma and even in Texas, but clearly most people there are minions of the evil empire of republicanism.

And politics is getting us all down. We all hoped Obama could force the gop to work with him some, not much maybe, but some. But we didn't figure that they would throw the baby out with the bathwater in their quest to get the "n****r" out of the White House. You know it is true. What I don't think they don't understand is that black folk are already clear on the fact that they are deliberately screwing the black guy president. Whether the repubs want to admit it or not, its a form of racism. Rush L. set the course two years ago when he said he wanted this president to fail. Or maybe they just don't actually care what the black folk think. They've got them down on the bottom. They keep 'em from becoming educated because look what happens when they are educated? They turn out to be superior to them rich white boys, like Mitt. And Rick. And particularly, George W. Bush.

I know that the real source of racism in the repubs is the classic: the black guy has the biggest dick, canard from long ago. Insecurity over penis size drives people like Mitt and Newt and allows Perry to overcompensate for his inability to actually understand certain things. And being a xtian allows them to be holier than thou about sexuality. You know, sex is bad. Black people are good at sex. Therefore black people are bad; particularly when they are doing it in the White House. How many orgasms do you think Laura Bush got in the White House?

And despite Herman Cain and that slimy bastard on the supreme court, Clarence Thomas, black folk are never gonna forgive the Repubs. And neither, ultimately, will the brown people. The latinos, despite the fact that they are overwhelmingly catholic in culture, just aren't going to be able to go for the Repubs knowing they actually hate them on a racial level. What was the term? Beaner? Something like that. You ever see that great scene in Giant when Rock Hudson gets into the fight in the diner over the mexican family getting served. Rock tries to stand up for them and gets his ass beaten by the white cracker cook. Good scene. True to life.

We can only hope that Obama survives the gauntlet of Republican obstructionism and comes out the other side with his integrity mostly in tact. Now that would be a triumph over racism in this country. If we could just allow the man to be the President we know he would be, if he were white.

Workshops, Pride, and Humility

2011-08-30T12:49:00.003-05:00

The shoreline begins to recede.

Well, I've sent out in the neighborhood of forty emails in the last two weeks, and had replies to only a couple. Is this the dog days of August? Are we on vacation, or taken up with going back to school? All these things and more, I am sure. Although not entirely sedentary this current life is solitary. In the 1970s, when I spent many hours of my life alone, with just my typewriter, I filled in the need for human contact by writing extensive letters and by running my household as a salon. A place where others could come and talk about music, rock music, poetry, fiction, politics and the Cubs. And I also threw quite a few parties in those days. Mostly for dancing and pot and speed, mixed with copious quantities of beer and hard liquor. I suppose the sort of party everyone has in their twenties.

Of course, I lived with a woman who was in her late thirties and early forties through that time. She worked for a living and I kept house and tried to write novels and generally ran things in what was the Scarritt Occasional Society. Years later, in the mid 1980s, John Knoepfle wrote a long exegesis on writers in Springfield in the 1970s and 1980s and he pretty much left me out entirely. He attributed the Scarritt group to Pat Smith. She had been instrumental in founding Brainchild, along with Sandra Martin and Peg Knoepfle (also Maurie Formigoni). His desire to write me out of the picture had to do with his guilt over having dumped me as a friend because of his wife's insane notions and my own guilt over having had an affair a decade before with a fourteen year old girl.

Well, that happened. But the fact of the matter is that there would never have been a Scarritt except for me. There may have been something else. Pat was a social person, but I did the work and I brought in the writers. It would have been nice to have some recognition of this along the way. My later writing group, The Writers BARBQ, for that I get some credit, though Becky Bradway gets a lot of the credit too. Yet, that group also would never have existed except that I was there to organize it, and to, as they say these days, facilitate it.

So I did those things. I made those phonecalls. I wrote those letters. People would come to my house for oh so many years, on Fridays generally, and I would ask who had material to read, and then we would read and speak to that material. Literally several hundred people over those thirty years. I developed early an ability to move things along. Also I figured out how to critique people without being negative. I believed then and still believe that it is better to encourage the good aspects of people's work and lives and not to dwell on their faults beyond merely mentioning what doesn't work from one's own perspective.

And I always believed in a democracy among artists. There was never one person who was better than the others, even though it is always true that some are indeed better than others. But for a reading group, for a workshop, everyone should be treated equally. Because we are all there to "improve" what we have brought to the table. Sure, there are always some people who come strictly for praise, for appreciation. And that's not of itself a bad thing. So much of this art takes place in a solitary world that getting some affirmation is very important. And since there will probably never be any real money, even for the published writer, it becomes even more important over the years.

But it is actually true that the person who desires to become a writer for the many, for the social aspect of writing (that is, to have an "audience") will inevitably be attracted to true criticism. Criticism that helps that person learn something about their work, their style, their content, and how it affects others. Those people are the people who learn the most, and who often make the most difference in a workshop.

And I think I gave pretty good workshop. Not strung out with the tricks of the trade. Knoepfle in his class had his string of things he told people. But he was always a lazy arbiter of the word. It shows in his own poetry which much of the time deserts its feelings for the sophisticated turn of the phrase. That's okay for him and he has made a career of it. But as someone who was in this world almost entirely for the sake of seeing good art created his workshop classes ultimately fell short.

As it was I ran many of those classes. Yes, John made the money, but I carried the buckets of water in the undergraduate world. Of course I had neither bachelor nor masters and certainly no phd. What did I have that he left me in charge of his class many many times? He knew I could do it. And I could do it. I could do it better than he could. But he always had a constant stream of people who took him under the delusion he could make them famous/get them published. In my entire 18 years hanging around Knoepfle I can tell you he was little help to anybody but himself. And as he aged he became ever more insufferable about his own work which became ever more trite and dependent entirely on an empty cleverness. So it goes in the land of academic poetry. He is not alone in this arc. Look at Kevin Stein.

So I spent my 20s/30s/40s running writing workshops, not for money, but for the love of the work itself. Did I get something out of it? Well, I still have many unpublished manuscripts in my boxes in my basement of people's novels and poems. Some of these stories and words I still pull out and enjoy and learn from. And while the groups continued I would get a certain amount of ego affirmation from them. After all, when someone listens to your critique and then applies it to their work, you can assume there was value there.

My last group lasted from 1986 through 1999. I am still in contact with most of the people in this group. And one of those humans, Martha Miller, published a new novel this year, which I was allowed to read in manuscript along the way. Very satisfying to me.

But now I live somewhere else. Somewhere other than that town, the city of my discontent, as Lindsay nicknamed it so many years ago. And I see few people where I am now, though I have been here ten years. I have few face to face friends. I don't remember the last time I threw a party. I am married to the best person I have ever known, Kimb, and we had our child, Piper, in 2003. The fact that Piper has turned out to be a special child, Aspergers Syndrome, has contributed to the increased isolation that I feel. The next ten years will be getting into the last years of this person's life. I might live twenty, but I would doubt much beyond that. My family history has the men leaving the scene around 80, and I am 61 this year. I will struggle to be there for this child, as she grows to adulthood.

Pretty much this takes up a lot of my existence, family time. And for this time I am very grateful. Those 70s 80s years my son did not get to have much from me I am afraid. Part of that was his mother moving to Oregon and then to California. But much of that came from my blowing off my twenties trying to be a writer and consequently having little in the way of money to help him or see him. Perhaps that is why these days I get little information from him and he and his wife and children have never come here, though we have been there several times.

Now we have the internet. Sometimes that seems like a good way to communicate. But often it feels to me as if I have left out something important. And I am essentially a confessional writer.You would think I have put down everything in one post or another.

Still, this day the end of August in the year 2011, I feel isolated from the whole of humanity. The desire in the body politic to destroy one group over another, mainly a republican conservative desire, is breaking down the essential idea of hope that must be at the heart of growth.

And I miss being with the writers. Often they were pretty silly. I have a box of audio tapes that Cheryl Frank made in the late 1970s. I keep thinking I should make them into cds before they are gone forever. But really, is it worth it? I wonder.

Meanwhile, there is that magician aspect of Tim Osburn. Divine Bear indeed. He lives on the precipice of his own humility. He can never quite bring himself to believe it was all worthwhile. And no one will actually read this. That is the demonstration of what I have become.

Chilling

2011-08-04T14:06:00.003-05:00

Well, we sort of survived the debt ceiling game, but it all still sucks even if not much really changed. The market fell 400 points today. I think if we had had a failure in the legislature the market would have fallen in the neighborhood of 1,000 to 1,500 points. And those are the people who are going to do the best in the new economy.

The truth comes out, of course. These are serious games being played for influence, power, and the biggest share of the pie. The oligarchs are now really truly in charge. The situation is not far different than early medieval times. The viciousness is there, and if we don't kill people outright today, we do destroy them.

Most people want to live the chill, the sort of life where quality is a concern. They do not want to strive for more or better. They simply want to live in their time and in their own private imagination of what is good. Those driven to succeed and make the most of things are different than the great mass of us.

The so-called conservatives would rant and say that thems what make all the money are by definition the way we all should be. That competition, be it NASCAR, or football, is the very essence of what made our culture the standout culture in the world.

With that they would be, as usual, completely wrong. What made us the world's best country is the ability to live with our neighbors and to chill every day. It allows us to accept the great changes of science and technology. It welcomes the idea of taking information from anywhere in the world and using it to make a better and even more chilled life.

This is the real american ideal. It has nothing to do with socialism, or with capitalism if the truth be told. People want to do good work and get paid enough money to cover a decent lifestyle. The problem with the economic situation is the desperate need for the strivers to feed their egos with ever larger piles of the green poop that the rest of us make. Jesus said it would be more difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven then to get a camel through the eye of a needle. But these folks don't believe in heaven, or Jesus for that matter. Or they have convinced themselves that he didn't mean them.

But I say to you the one completely accurate quote from the new testament: What you do to the least of my brethren you do to me.

And you do it to yourself, to your children, to all the people you touch. We are all mostly clearly on your greed and your pathetic ego. Donald Trump comes to mind. You are sad people, and when you are weighed against the feather of truth, you are going to find out that accumulating a lot of other people's lives in the form of money actually counted against you.

That's what we call irony.

Mischief Managed!

2011-07-15T08:35:00.002-05:00

So this morning, the 15th of July, 2011, I get on Facebook and get directed to the page "I solemnly swear I am up to no good!" And there are thousands of entries and they all say "Mischief Managed!" And I just got to say, thanks Jo Rawlings, for giving so much heart and soul to so many millions of other human beings. This is what real art is all about.

And if you don't know what I'm talking about, I just feel sorry for you. For you will have missed the most singular event of the last decade. More important by far then 9/11 and the political wars. More important than the decepticons and the housing bubble. Harry Potter will effect more change in this world than any of the ideologies that set bombs or that whine about what marriage really is.

So, once again, let's all thank Jo Rawlings for the great gift of the Boy who lived, and his friends. For the triumph of a complicated and flawed good over a powerful but pathetically ego driven evil. Life goes on. Try and do good. Try not lie. Try as hard as you can to support each other and forgive each other.

Thanks to the Lady for the magical world we live in. Open your eyes people. Open your minds.

Lost in the Woods: The New Depression

2011-07-12T14:04:00.003-05:00

Saddle up kiddies, the ride is about to really start. The Republicans are trying to destroy the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. They are the shock troops of the rich oligarchs who would turn us into whatever Russia has become: a place where most people just get by, but they, the rulers, live a life on pleasure and luxury and answer to no one. That is the Rupert Murdoch vision of real governance and it is what John Boehner believes in in his very heart. Of course, he also believes he deserves all the money he can accrue and that I deserve none of it and certainly no actual health care.

So the Republicans are taking us to the very edge. I begin to hope they do go to default. The economic world will be rocked and the Wall Street Journal will find out that those they have supported have now chosen the end of times for this great country. If there is default, there will be 60 million checks not issued in August. People won't get their social security, businesses won't be paid, contractors won't be paid. And those people will then not pay their creditors. They won't make their mortgage payments, they won't go to the store. People will be laid off all over the country. And worse than that, the markets around the world will spasm, looking for some sort of safety.

There won't seem to be any. Rich people will start realizing their money kept in stocks and bonds will soon be worthless. Then the outcry will really come. Kill the bastards! This time it won't just be the poor talking of revolution around the dinner table. This time it will be the middle class.

And all those brave tea partiers will be on the other side, suddenly. They'll be on the side with that N_____ in the white house, as they like to say. I believe that if there is even a day or two shutdown of things that the markets will tank one to three thousand points and there will be a mad scramble in DC to do something right away. At that point Obama will force the Republicans to do what he wants, but he'll sound reasonable about it. Either they will fold or they will fight and then, and then, then there will really be Marx's economic war.

Of course, being Republican jackasses and taking orders from the rich and the old moneyed players, they will fold and though they will try to keep to their weird anti-tax stance, Obama will force some sort of re-ordering of revenues on them and they will all vote for it. Even Michelle I'm a complete idiot Bachmann.

And, if this doesn't come to pass, then things will just get really bad, right away. The loss of 1.5% GDP caused the 2008 fall. This loss could and probably will be in the neighborhood of 44% of GDP. Buy some canned food. It may be mostly what you will be able to get in the immediate future.

So many people will suffer here and thousands will die for one reason or the other. A lot of people here are armed and there will be a lot of theft of food and medical supplies.

I don't have a gun. I truly hope they decide to work together for no one's political benefit, but to keep the country they are supposed to care about stable.

It's pretty unlikely.

Can Barack Obama save us from ourselves? I don't know. First thing is we'd have to look in a mirror and be honest about what we see. I only see millions of people, pretending things are completely different than they are. Even people at the top who you must know they are lying to us because they have this information. Eric Cantor and John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. You can see ol Mitch is getting scared. He said today there was no way the Republicans were gonna let this happen. Let him tell that to Paul Ryan and his buddies in the House.

Asking the Lady for Her great mercy. For me, for my country, for this entire world. Bring the truth to light. Make them answer for their words and deeds. Show us the way. Show us the Way

Invoke the 14th Amendment

2011-07-01T14:19:00.002-05:00

Let's hear it for the 14th Amendment. It says that the US has to pay it debts, among other things. I believe the President is duty bound, by his oath to honor the Constitution, as it is currently written, to invoke the 14th Amendment, when the Republicans fail to pass a new cap to the national debt because they think it will fire up their base and the damage will all be to the poor and middle class.

Obama should do this, invoke the amendment and take over paying the bills, by the last week in July. He should go on television and tell the world that the United States doesn't default on its debts, no matter what the minority party wants, and that he, as the one truly responsible adult in Washington, DC, is doing what has to be done to meet America's obligations in the market place.

Then he should invite John Boehner to meet him at the White House to compromise on a package of true reductions and increased taxes that will make the country stable again. When Boehner and the Republicans resist this Obama can basically go on the air and tell the country, you can either have financial stability and vote for the democrats, or you have recession and then depression and vote for the Republicans. That is the stark choice the Republicans are setting up.

Americans can be pretty dumb about leaders. They re-elected George W. Bush, even though it was perfectly clear the guy wasn't a very good president. That ended up making the financial crisis much much worse. But it was hardly the first time Americans have made the dumb choice. Look at Richard Nixon. At least Nixon was reasonably competent as politicians go.

It really all comes down to this:
If the Republicans won't compromise on taxes, then the President has a constitutional duty to save the republic. He should invoke the 14th amendment and pay our debts. He should instruct the Treasury to sell whatever bonds are necessary to keep the ship afloat.

I ask the Lady to guide us to safer waters, and soon. I ask the Lady to help Boehner and his club see the light and resist pandering to the people who would destroy this country. I ask the Lady for Her mercy. We need it now, more than ever.

Clarence Thomas is A Whore

2011-06-18T17:11:00.003-05:00

Yeah. The black guy on the supreme court is nothing more than a shithead little black kid who's ready to runs errands for the rich white man and feel important because he does it. And golly, now the white folks has given him his own blonde whore to fuck. And she's been made an important rightwing whore, helping Clarence to feel like he hasn't just completely screwed his entire race for his own selfish motives.

Really, this guy is an embarrassment. Thurgood Marshall has been utterly dishonored by the Republican right wingers. I don't blame the first Bush, per se. He was just doing what his rich guy handlers told him to do. But I think if he understood what a tool Clarence Thomas was he would never have put that name in nomination.

In any case, it turns out that Thomas is the bought property, the slave boy, to a genial southern millionaire user named Harlan Crow. Mistah Crow is taking care of his boy, Clarence. You can count on that. And Mistah Crow knows Clarence is gonna do what a good boy does for his massah.

And when Clarence Thomas dies and crosses over, the cadre of his ancestors are gonna be there for the reading of his lies, the lies to the rest of us, and the worst lies, the ones he told himself for reasons of ego, power, and money. What a sad, pathetic man he has turned out to be.

But, we really, always knew this. Anita Hill told no lies. And we just didn't listen because it was "partisan". This is what partisan brings us: Shit, masquerading as an important black man. No need to use the n word here; this asshole would be pathetic no matter what culture or race he grew up in.

Thanks to the Lady for Her mercy. May this man find his truth before he dies and has to face the terror that is being confronted by your own lies.

refugees on the unarmed road of flight

2011-06-15T14:06:00.006-05:00

Maybe a new post, or maybe just another memory, masquerading as an idea of salvation. Yeah, being saved. That was a long distorted ambition of mine, hooked up, as it were, to sex and sexuality. Now I just long for being truly desired. And this does happen, occasionally.

But what is really in my shadowed consciousness this hour are my friends, my cousins, my lost memories from the sixties. In 1971 my twin cousins, Larry and Leslie Owens, had their existences taken by a weaselly guy who went to prison, but who is out now, having his jolly life at their expense. What happened between them all I don't know, but the fact of the incident is that he drove them to the country, just before they were to leave Texas, and he shot them both in the head, like a cowardly little reptile.

Motive? I don't have a clue. Perhaps he was in love with them. Perhaps he wanted to be them. They were certainly his superiors in every way. My aunt told me to take a record album from their collection, as a momento. And she gave me Larry's boots, which I have to this day. I wore them on stage once, during a performance of Annie Get Your Gun in which I played the minor role, Pawnee Bill. I ended up picking out three records, each with a specific reason: One of them was a country joe MacDonald album that had a song on it about picking up a hitchhiker who turns out to be Jesus. Good mystical stuff. We bought into that in them days. Then there was a Incredible String Band album, Wee Tam and Big Huge, which I also still have. It had this lovely song on it, "Maya", with the enduring lyric, "All the world is but a stage/be thou the joyful player!"

The third record was Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. When I first acquired this I had bought it at my uncle Laurence's record store in Enid. I took it to the Owen's house and played it on the wonderful Fisher console they had at the time. I could hardly believe there was a song on it that was ten minutes long, and it wasn't even an instrumental ("Desolation Row"). We, the four of us, Larry, Leslie, my brother Greg, and my self, marveled at the impossibly surreal lyrics and then we played the rockin' stuff again, "Like A Rolling Stone." I actually remember the first time I heard Rolling Stone on the radio and kept expecting it to get over and it didn't. I was very familiar with Dylan even then, but being on the AM radio and having it go the full six minutes was a revelation in those days.

I still have this album too, I mean I still have the Twins' copy of it. I also have a dutch copy of it that belonged to my first wife, Becky McGovern who had gone to high school in Brussels, Belgium. I haven't played the vinyl in perhaps twenty years. My daughter Paige burned me an illicit cd of Highway 61 Revisited last year. But I have bought the album at least four times myself. I was about two years older than the Twins. And my bro Greg was just about their age. They all went to college the same year, the Twins to Rice in Houston, and my bro Greg to Washington University in St. Louis.

Greg doesn't talk to me anymore. I have only seen him twice in the last 35 years, both times associated with my parents dying in the mid 1990s, and both times in Wichita. I lived briefly in Los Angeles in the fall of 1982, and I called Greg, but he refused to talk to me. Did we have a falling out? I don't know. Nobody actually told me about it. I remember arguing with him about Noam Chomsky, the weekend my sister Kathy got her Phd at St. Louis University, in perhaps 1974. But I don't remember that as being at all bitter or recriminative. By then I had been married, had a son, and gotten divorced and was trying to go back to college. Greg was already in law school in St. Louis. That's what he does now. He's a lawyer in Los Angeles. But he is as gone from my life as the Twins are. When Herman the Vermin shot my friends, my cousins, that November night in 1971, he managed to cut out a big piece of my life, maybe really most of my early life.

There is always pain associated with those memories now. I can't really let myself return to the family trips to Enid and to those times when they visited us in Wichita. You know what, that completely sucks, and there isn't any wisdom in this recounting. I am unlikely to ever forgive the "boy genius" who chose to end the lives of humans who were clearly more valuable than he would ever be. In a way he just reminds me of Hinckley the sad little boy who tried to kill Reagan. He was trying to make himself important. That's what that kind of murder is really all about. I know he probably felt betrayed and righteous about what he imagined his relationship with Larry and Leslie was, or was supposed to be. A part of me wonders if he was gay and had that hopeless crush on them that gay men would get in those days. My best friend from high school, Tom Bezzi, had that crush on his roommate at Notre Dame, and very nearly killed himself because of it. I wish Herman had had the grace to sink his own boat. But, he so very clearly was and is a loser. When he dies they will be there, waiting for him. Waiting for his explanation. And he will have to feel that shame and sadness. It is there, even now.

Finally, I found the grave of my best friend from grade school, Pat Hotze, on find a grave recently. I knew that he had died. First my little brother, David, the one who still talks to me occasionally, told me he'd seen his tombstone on a walk through Calvary Cemetery in Wichita, where my folks are buried. Then I started emailing with my old friend, Jamey Nyberg, who still lives in Wichita and who, it turns out, was Pat's cousin and had been to the funeral. Coronary Artery Disease. Pat would've been just past 50 at the time. The date on the stone was the end of September, 2001. We all remember what a crappy time that was. The vastness of our fear. The irony here is that the last time I saw Jamey Nyberg in person was the evening in Wichita after having been to Enid to bid my twin cousins adieu, Thanksgiving weekend, 1971.

I give my thanks to the Lady for Her mercy in this dark, uncertain time. I miss you Larry and Leslie. I miss you Brother Greg. I miss Pat Hotze. All important people in my life.

The Mormons are Coming! The Mormons are Coming!

2011-06-14T10:26:00.004-05:00

The snarks of current utopian dweebs; that is to say, the first Republican debate of this season. It took place in New Hampshire last night, and despite the large group of people willing to say anything at all to get a chunk of the power cheese, it turns out that Republicans are gooey soft in the center after all. Mitt Romney won the debate, going away, though Michelle Bachman pulled out of the pack as far as the crazy wing of the party goes.

It was always likely that Mitt would be the one seen by the elite as having the best chance to chase the Obama Man from the top of the heap. I truly wonder why that is, but I do think the zeitgeist was promoted Joseph Smith-wise by the crashing success of The Book of Mormon at the Tonys night before last.

Gosh, those darn Mormons! They even let black people in (after 1978, when God rearranged his list of appropriate latter day saints). In any case, it's a Romney romp for the moment. And with Michelle turning out to be good at the debate thing, does this mean that the Queen in waiting, Sarah the P., is done for this round?

It will be interesting to see what Sarah does to try and wrest the diva crown back from Michelle. There's already been a small bit of sniping between the two camps. It is said that Michelle has Iowa already wrapped up. We reserve judgement on that, but nobody around here would be surprised to see Michelle Bachman pull Iowa out of her, well, let's call it a hat.

And so Mitt (how I love that name, so baseball, so foodie, so my name backward!) is taking a big pass on the Iowans. He depends upon those live free or diers in New Hampshire to prove his bona fides. Of course, last time they went for John McCain. Now I have lived in NH and I can tell you that the reason McCain won in 08 is because the independents who can swing either way assumed the Obama had already wrapped up the dem nod and so they voted republican to try and swing the repubs back to the center of things. At that time McCain was viewed as a moderate, even a liberal republican.

Of course, as we all know, after a few months on the campaign trail John McCain devolved into the guy who picked Sarah Palin to take over after his heart attack. That one thing, alone, lost him the election. No matter what the Palinites say, the image of Tina Fey invoking her Queenship's vision of Russia from the front porch wrote cancelled on McCain's final big check. Yada yada, as they say.

So, if it is the Mittster, amid the newly mormoning of america, what does that mean for Barack and the dems? I have to say I would really enjoy that debate, between the cool black dude and the plastic boy from old money. I think Mitt would probably be able to tack to the center gracefully and keep his very Mittness as an asset. Can he win? Too many variables to know.

As a hardcore dem and an early supporter of Obama, I wish the repubs would nominate Sarah Palin, because I think Barack could handle the woman well and would win by a margin, coattails even. But as an american who actually cares about the future (I have two granddaughters and expect I'll have some more down the way), I think I'd prefer a more sober contest. And I do think Mitt actually offers that to the country.

As for poor old Tim Pawlenty. Dude, it was always just a dream. Give it up and keep on moving.

And Newt? What a weiner (yes even more of a weiner than the weiner man himself). Self deluded pretty much to the max. Give it a rest man. Close the pie hole. Go on a diet. Self your wife's jewels and fund an end hunger program in the third world. Be useful. You claim to be a catholic, well, get right with the church's teachings. You are way off base with this pro-rich guy stuff.

I did read somebody this a.m. who suggested that the Donald will run as an independent on his own money. I counter that by saying in reality Donald Trump doesn't have that much money and wouldn't waste it on a run he probably wouldn't win. Once again though, as an Obama supporter and someone who hopes the country has an actual future, I urge the Donald to take the independent plunge. I believe it would guarantee the re-election.

Finally, I'd really hoped that there would be a great deal more range to the republicans this year. But if they are all going to just shuffle and bow to who they think the tea partiers are, then I'm not watching anymore of this show. And then it will truly be over by xmas (yes, even before the actual voting and caucusing). Just keep your eye on the fundraising. Where the money goes, so goes the party. That's republicanism.

Thanks to the Lady for the mercy of a sense of humor in this crazy weird time.

Queen Sarah

2011-06-03T13:27:00.004-05:00

Strange mutations of nature: Sarah Palin supposedly asked Donald Trump to run for President. That's according to Trump, of course. Meanwhile Sara's on her vacation around the holy patriotic sites. She rolls up in her bus and stays long enough for pictures. She trots out the kids and makes them pose and when they say can we please leave she ignores them completely.

Sarah Palin is clearly one of the worst mothers as public figure we have ever seen. Contrast Bill and Hilary's daughter with Palin's Bristol.

Also I think Palin isn't exactly running for president. I think she is running for Queen. And why everyone doesn't see this, I'm not totally sure. Her idea of an important person used to be Ivana Trump. That is really who she sees herself as.

But seriously folks, anybody who is or votes republican these days is just not paying attention. Note, I am not saying democrats have it together. I'm saying that they are less damaging then the grand old party. Seriously, two more years of this governance, and then combine it with a Palin presidency and we are in the toilet for sure.

Well, America. What's it gonna be, or you gonna vote to end the American century? Or are we going to decide to make the hard choices and get somewhere.

First the rich have to pay their fair share. And their fair share should be at least three times what it is now. All that money that they have and are hanging on to came from us working people putting in time on the job. It was our money and they took it from us, whether at the gas pump or at the big box store. It doesn't matter. We made that money and they took it from us.

And yes we got something for it. But the only reason they could run their companies in the first place is because we give money to have the union, to have the armed forces, to police the marketplace. And they are not paying the tithe to those entities that is needed to keep the ship afloat.

So if we do keep electing Republicans, in a nostalgic haze, we will have signed the death warrant for our civilization. Of course, that is what the Queen, Queen Sarah, Queen Esther, truly wants. She thinks the Rapture and the Second Coming of JC are right around the corner and it is her duty to do what it takes to bring it on.

Palin believes she is the bearer of God's good news, the end of the world. That she doesn't see her own sins and has no humility simply proves that she can have nothing really to do with Yeshua. At least the Yeshua in the new testament.

If she is really god's instrument, then I am on the other side, no matter what.

Luckily, I know better. I know for one thing that the Goddess isn't coming back to earth. She is already here, right now. And I know that apocalyptic visions are the greedy daydreams of the people who cannot face a world in which they are forced to live in justice with their fellow humans.

Fuck them, I gotta say.

Regards to the Lady Arianrhod for giving us the mercy of a sense of humor.

Against the Apocalypse

2011-04-25T10:04:00.003-05:00

Every day it is getting a little darker here in the Shining City on the Hill. I don't understand why the aristocracy isn't concerned about how the rising price of gasoline is playing here in America-Land. It's like we are all on the same ship, but they think their cabins are more water proof. The fact is this: eventually the whole thing will sink as it takes on water down at the bottom where the poor people are kept.

But, we've got the tv, and the movies, and the internet (though, clearly, the Republicans in congress are desperate to take the internet away from us and give it to the really really rich and only the really rich). The real and specific question is this: are we just a basically pretty stupid animal, led by the smarter members of the herd, and taken to the edge of the cliff because that's where the smart ones see the best prey?

Those that occupy the seats of power, and those that hold the keys to the resources, they do not seem to understand that we all rise and fall together. The planet is what it is; not some specific little chunk of it that they have carved out and believe is beyond catastrophe.

If we were really the smartest animal, the godlike creature that so many of the evangelicals and the mormons like to believe we are, the first thing we would do is classify all arguments built on false science as being off the table. Thus, no one could say there was no such thing as "global warming," nor could they say that "evolution" is not an accurate representation of what has gone before us, biologically. Yet, here among those who have the most, and in america's definition thus the brightest, those dumbass arguments are politically powerful and cause many millions of people to throw money at those who use such lies as fact.

So, kids, we are probably fucked. Does anyone remember that concept from a few years ago that the reason we don't encounter any other intelligent species in the universe is that because intelligence/self awareness just brings us to the point where we can manage our own extinction? Yes, the idea is that we are just bright enough to destroy ourselves; that other species have achieved this, and that we are well on our way to that very end.

And that is one the God of Abraham can wrap his nutsy little self around. The coda to the theory is rather obvious: The creator self keeps creating further experiments in self consciousness looking for the one species that has become smart enough to avoid this natural same say gene coded tendency for armageddon. In other words, will there be any of us to survive the coming end times, whichever end it is we are in time for, and will they then learn the lesson that being aware of your self and of your own mortality doesn't give you license to destroy whatever stands in the way of your ego's needs?

So, okay, I'm an old crank. Nobody reads this, and I'm sure there are good arguments against the kind of nihilist overview you are seeing here. But in a time when the Republican Party in the USA is essentially built on falsehoods and racism, and when we are lost in a time when the price of gasoline is destroying the imperfectly rational presidency of a decent man, it becomes an obvious kind of song and dance, to head towards the exits.

There is actually hope, though. I believe the Great Lady who gave life to the essentially crude structure of atoms and substances that were created and sent on their journey by the big bang, I believe She is actually our Mother, and does what can be done to give us every possible chance of redeeming ourselves, of surviving our own base and craven stupid choices. I believe we see this in not only the greater world but in our own daily lives where though we make mistakes we can find ways to heal and change and be the good people that we would like to be. The key, always, is to accept the actual truth. And that is the hardest thing we all can do. Live in the truth. My thanks to the Lady, Isis, who has given me back my self lo these many years. And in my hand, my final part, the hammer that was wielded by Thor, and by Odin. I am still the son of Herne, the Stag in the forest, trying to stay alive and bring the future into being.

Let's Play No Trump

2011-04-19T11:59:00.003-05:00

So now we live in a very strange land indeed. Donald Trump may or may not be running for president. Why? One has to wonder what it is Donald is after. The political columns are pretty much in a fluffy state on this. It is yet another aspect of the circus this country's politics has become. Indeed, it is almost predictable that it would come to this. After Sara Palin came along and showed the aristrocracy that you don't actually have to deal with the main stream media anymore to get and retain power. It was really only a question of time before Trump jumped in.

As a man who wears a very obvious and even ridiculous toupee, Trump is clearly living inside a bubble of ego that is really only matched by the bubble of national debt we, as a country, carry. This guy is so convinced he is special that it seems nothing can ever bring him back to reality.

If he does run, and I suspect he may because the polls show him garnering support among the unwashed intelligentsia that calls itself the tea party movement, if he does run, then he will have to abide by certain laws. In particular he will have to disclose his financial empire. That might put him off, in a normal year. But this year seems to him to be a chance to make it to the very pinnacle of power, as he sees it.

And if Ms. Sara would just run, then the Republican primary season would become the most interesting reality show american tv has ever had the chance to show. Of course, Fox would get most of the really amazing footage. But all the networks would have a field day, going here and there, waiting for the next foolish and extraordinary thing that one of these people would say.

And where will this leave the Republicans? It is hard to say. I have gotten used to the fact that a significant percentage of my fellow americans will willingly vote against their own obvious self interest entirely in the name of feeling good about some person or idea that they have taken to heart. A recent study showed that blue staters were more swayed by logic and red staters were following their hearts. How can you say that is bad? Heh.

This is a reality that the powers that be, the aristocracy that runs things, cooked up in the bowels of American Heritage and National Review, and now they are on the verge of discovering that they can't control the emotional beast they have identified and unleashed. It is what happens when elites try to use the lumpenproles to get their way.

I am totally reminded of that scene in the movie version of Cabaret, after the little boy has led the beer garden's crowd in a rendition of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me", and the German Baron and his guests, our heroes Michael York and Liza Minelli, are driving away. York says, "what are you going to do about the nazis?" And the German Baron says, "Oh, we'll let them take care of the communists, and then we will take care of them." Yeah, right.

Yes, the official rightwing created this situation. Now they will have to play in the sandbox with a bunch of nuts and it is entirely possible that one of the nuts will come out on top. What would they do if Sara Palin ended up as the nominee? Would they support her wholeheartedly? How about the Donald?

And while I'm on the subject, The Donald. He's a cartoon character. But he has a huge audience. People like him????? I have looked at his show and he seems like a fat little bully, playing games with other people's heads. Just the kind of guy you want the world to see, representing freedom and democracy. This guy changes his opinions with the wind. If anything, if I were a rightwing partisan, I would worry that this guy is a closet liberal, and that he's trying to wreck the party.

Who are the people actually supporting these two (and Michelle Bachman, and the other freakin' nuts on the fringe)? They represent a significant number of your neighbors. I don't say friends, because it is clear that these people are terrified of friendship and other human beings. The paranoia level is sky high in tea party land. And victimhood is their primary state. They know they are the ones who have been victimized, not the black folk, not the browns. They know that the bankers and politicians have stolen everything from them. That's why they want a major league banker up there, to do a good job of finishing them off.

Because, that is what Trump would really accomplish. He and his republican friends would finally roll that ball down the alleyway and crash all the pins that hold this thing together. And finally, we would have real chaos, a real chance for the NRA members to show that they'll survive, no matter what, even if it means killing their neighbors (not friends, they don't have em) for whatever food and supplies they can scavenge.

Ultimately, Donald Trump represents the failure, the utter abysmal failure, of capitalism. Not of free markets, mind you. Not of the idea of business and the exchange of value for goods and services and labor. No, the failure of capitalism, the idea that money working for you is a good thing.

When all the supposed value goes away, the only things worthwhile will be real goods, land, food, energy producing systems. The stock market will have gone to its final bell. Your investments will be so much paper.

Hey, will it happen? Nah. No real chance, no matter how loud the apocalypsers play that music. Long odds are that some pretty reasonable human will be the republican nominee (shame if its Romney, frankly. He can't win.) Maybe Huckabee. And that person will probably lose to Barack Obama in November of 2012. And it will be within a few percentage points. Obama will get all the blacks and most of the browns, and most of the kids, and a lot more of the old people than you would've thought, thanks to the repubs for coming up with destroying medicare. What a gift.

Of course, there's that preacher who has figured out it all ends this May, so maybe this'll never be a question?

But, can you see Donald Trump, in the white hourse, talking about redecorating it in his style? Can you see Sara P., promising american military support for the isrealis war on whatever middle eastern nation they decide is the biggest threat (see Iran).

I can only ask the Lady Arianrhod for Her mercy and her love. Perhaps some of us will survive this time and get a good chuckle around the campfire. Meanwhile, the world continues to turn. Thank the Lady.

Normal Despair, America in 2011

2011-03-15T11:27:00.002-05:00

Now that its 10 years since 9/11, and now that the oligarchy is sufficiently entrenched, we can begin that conversation about the new feudalism that I know everyone has been dying to have.

It is clear from the destruction of the public school system that is now underway that what the oligarchs (the Koch Brothers) really want is a public educated only to the level of serfdom, essentially kept around to be cogs in their vast wealth creating machines. The idea for these humans is that some members of the species are privileged to squeeze the labor out of the vast majority of the species.

They imagine themselves to be the Queen Bee and the Queen Ant, and the rest of us are either drones or workers. I myself aspire to drone status.

What will be the outcome of the move in this direction? This isn't like the days of yore, real feudalism, when the upper class had solid control of the military and the armed. Today in America there are guns everywhere. No one really has good control over vast segments of the population. I think what the Kochs and their ilk really imagine to be the case is that the random dangerous population (read black men, primarily) are easily diverted by drugs, promiscuous sex, and fighting over these small neighborhood sized concerns, witness rap wars over inconsequential insults.

It remains to be seen whether the great majority of white workers, those in the public sector unions and those in manufacturing, as they approach the true poverty state the Kochs have envisioned for them, will also be diverted from taking action by sporting events. It is quite ironic that the oligarchs of sports are creating the situation of no football next year (unless the players accept their status as the bottom rung of the profit ladder), before an election year where it is finally possible that the mass of ordinary people will recognize that the Republican game plan does not include the middle class anymore.

If there is no professional football in 2011-2012, and the Governors Walker of the nation continue to rip the economic floor out from under the people who's financial lives they have access to, then there truly will some sort of very odd reckoning in '12. It's difficult to know whether this country, as a whole, will bend over and present its buttocks to these men for full possession or not. Hard to say. But, this will not happen without a great deal of noise.

And if the political process is so completely manipulated by republican money, as happened in 2010, it is not hard to see where things must ultimately go. There are a lot of armed lower class people out there. In this age of digital information, it is very easy to discover the physical location of particularly legislators and corporate officers. They will discover the need to keep moving, but in the long run, even that is unlikely to save them.

The saddest truest part of all this is of course the fact that they too must die. Nobody lives forever, or even for very long. And when they die they will discover that no matter their belief about their acts in the corporeal world they are expected to face the actual truth of all they said and did and all they told themselves that were false and destructive.

It is grimly funny that the Kochs and their buddies don't actually understand that they will be responsible for all that they have wrought.

I thank the Lady that I know the truth of this aspect of existence. Not that it will save me from my own deceptions and the destruction I have left in my own path. But at least I will go on the scale with some notion of what I have done. As honest as I can find in my heart to be. I struggle every day for this truth.

Dreaming of Old Friends

2011-03-10T14:07:00.003-06:00

So whatever happened to Tony Kallas? Anthony Kallas. Ricardo Amezquita's old buddy, though he always insisted on calling him "Ah mez Squitah" for no reason that I could discern. It was never explained to me.

Tony was a macho Charlie Bukowski poet in the early mid 1970s. He had been in the service and had Vietnam behind him. He was a very handsome man, very greek, with the dark hair and beard. Sort of that Kris Kristofferson roughness.

I liked his poetry because it didn't pretend to the gentile at all. Of course that is probably why Kallas is unpublished today, but Victor Pearn is the Happy Poet in Colorado, with his pulitzer prize nominations for a lot of fairly weak stuff. It's not a good world, the world of institutional poetry. As a matter of fact, most of american literature tends to be dominated by people who studied how to run art, not how to make it. Some of these folks are fine, but most of them are just bureaucrats, seeking to accrue power.

Not that it matters much. Nobody reads my poems, but I know they are good and have things to say. Tony K.'s work was pretty tough, and some of it was quite funny. I remember clearly a poem using the various metaphors for male masturbation. Choking the chicken, indeed. He had a real streak of the tragic in him too.

Eventually, Sangamon Poets, the chapbook series that Knoepfle and I put together (not that I get any of the credit for this in the world of literature) published a chap of Tony's work, Rock River Suite. I think I used a pen and ink drawing by Nancy Ranyard for the cover. A beautiful piece. I don't know if Tony ever followed it up, though I know he had a few publications in those days.

Later on at the end of the 70s Tony became quite enamored of Janne H. and worked on wooing her for a very long time. I assume he succeeded as I know they spent some time together in a hotel on Spfld.'s east side and I also know that she went to Dixon/Mount Sterling, where Tony mainly lived (hometown; Reagan's too). Tony lived with a woman there and he had been married and had sons I believe. Well, Janne hung with me, too, and I lived with a woman (Pat Smith) and had been married and I had a son too. So we can see those things were no impediment in those days. At least not for Janne.

I remember discovering them together in a car parked on Washington Street the night that Scarritt hosted a party for the Illinois Writers, Inc., Red Herring group's annual summer do. We had had it in Springfield at the Leland Hotel building. And Jane Morrel had done a reading at the Vachel Lindsay home. Pat was really pissed at me that night and we did a mass reading in the backyard that was played over the house stereo and recorded (and yes I have that tape somewhere).

Pat was pretty drunk when she started reading her poems, but she did a fabulous job. She was really quite the performer and should have pursued this more than she did. In any case, several of the poems she read were clearly aimed at me. They were essentially calling me out for having the interest of the girl next door, and also for the years I'd spent in some sort of stupid weird psychic relationship with Janet Marie.

That night was also interesting because Gary Adkins' read The Great American Highway Speech, from his working novel, The Horror at Creal Springs. He was also quite drunk and he roared through the spring night. It was pretty much Walt Whitman, reborn in a comic opera novel about Lovecraftian demons.

Anyway, I found Janne and Tony in a car out front, while the readings were still going on. You'd think I'd just accept she'd moved on from me at this point, but actually we had several more intimate encounters in the next couple of years. After I ended up living with Becky Bradway though I pretty much avoided Janne. I figured it didn't matter anymore. She didn't really love me like she said. Or things had changed. And they always do. That's okay. But, what happened there had more to do with cowardice, her's and mine. So it goes.

I talked to her once, in 1987, when I was living on Bryn Mawr with Bradway. She called me but I just said there wasn't any point to it. We had gone different places. I think, to this day, that she thought I'd always be there for her to yank that string. And I think she was pretty surprised to find out that wasn't so.

Well, I was a bozo back then. Tony wasn't a bozo like me, but he was a flawed character too. I don't know what happened between him and Janne, but Janne was never going to be someone captured in any way. Not to say that Tony was like that. I don't know really. He was a cool guy who could really write. That's enough for my memory.

Deceit and the Mind

2011-03-03T12:21:00.002-06:00

Well there are many memories in any given life. Assembling them into some sort of format is really not all that useful an activity. The nature of existence, and especially the nature of the kind of thought that allows the self to create an act that we perceive as beautiful as art is not actually rational. It does not really proceed in any kind of linear fashion.

More accurately, the mind has numerous aspects constantly afoot in its conscious and subconscious workings. Perceptions fire cells of memory, creating things like hunger, longing and fear. There are all the average tasks to be maintained, breathing, running the system making sure it is all still doing what it is tasked to do. Meanwhile the mind also has its various games and deceits that need to be handled.

It is a truism that multiple personality disorder people are all essentially dealing with and hiding from serious sexual abuse usually before the age of seven. This is the mind engaging in deceit at the most primal level. It also explains why some deceit can become necessary for continuing the existence of the organism. Lots of people have some form of traumatic stress syndrome, too. It's a tool of the mind, to allow the person to cope with the experience, whether on the battlefield or in the bedroom. This is important stuff.

It gets me back to what I struggle with here: telling the truth. How do I know that I am telling myself the truth? If the ability to deceive one's self is a normal tool of survival for all of us (and it is), then how can I know at any given point when I am lying to myself to make it possible to go on living?

This is an important question for the human animal at this time. We can look at each other, online, and see countless examples of people deliberately deceiving themselves about politics, relationships, food, success. Man, you name it and we are lying to ourselves about it. And we are acting on those lies.

Clearly the truth of this is really apparent to anyone who has thought about how other people seem to see the world much. Just read the comments on any web post anywhere at all and you will find that a significant number of them are from people who to you seem insane, because of what they choose to believe. I think coming to know that this is so then promotes the idea that you can root out the lies in your mind.

I think you can do this, but I do not think it can be done in an ordered manner. This is where I understand that Scientology really is a scam. It seems like it might be the right idea, but when you know that the mind is a mosaic that changes dynamically throughout one's whole life, then the very idea of processing your memories one at a time becomes ludicrous. By the time you're halfway through them the actuality of how you remember them will have changed again.

I get a different detail every time out the door. That's who I am. Today I have bits of songs and Greg Lakebrink paintings springing to mind. I spent most of my life being a friend to Greg, and I have watched him produce many hundreds of watercolors and oils, a good many of which I can call up in my mind right now. These pieces are often hooked to specific other people or scenes that I have known and lived through in my sixty years. And Greg was a great influence on me, musically. He introduced me to that genre of english/irish/scottish folk-based rock and roll epitomized (for me) by Steeleye Span (and for Greg) and by Fairport Convention.

Aspects of these essentially emotional notations have colored my fiction for nearly forty years now.

So I strive to accept the deceits of my mind, to find them, to perceive them really, to figure out why I have needed them, and to come to terms with whether I can go on living without them. When I hear the ballad of Tam Lin in the other room, I am pretty sure that the metaphor of changing to avoid the devil is an apt one. Somewhere in the light is the truth. It is not a courtroom thing. It can never be like that.

When I come to Maat for my heart to be weighed against the feather of truth, I hope I have accepted myself enough to balance the scale.

As before, I ask the Lady, today as Galadriel, for Her sweet mercy. My heart is your's, always.

History of the World Disappearing

2011-02-08T13:23:00.003-06:00

When I started college: It was 1968. It had been an emotional year for me. I had nearly not graduated from the boys high school college prep factory run by the Jesuits that I attended, Chaplain Kapaun Memorial High School. I only got out of there intact because the physics teacher, Father Simms, gave me a D when I truly did not deserve it. He was a mensch, though I didn't really understand that. Of course, he was probably pushed in that direction by the powers that be there because I had won a couple of scholarships, one of them to St. Louis University, the home of all the Jesuits I knew at the time.

I was utterly unprepared for life at that time. I don't know what my folks thought I was doing. I had worked for Bobby Kennedy in the spring, before he was assassinated in Los Angeles, and I was dating, on and off, Marcia Froelke (now Coburn), who was also semi-involved with Barry Paris and Mike Dwyer, though they weren't in town (Wichita), and I was. I also had a longterm penpal relationship with a beautiful, sweet girl who was my Aunt Del's niece, but not directly related to me, Anna Mary Aguirre. She lived in Brooklyn with her Basque family and attended catholic girls school and was a year or two behind me.

The family, meaning mainly my mother, set me up to go work for my brother-in-law, Tom Bubnar, in the metal plating factory that Tom's father and uncle ran in Detroit. This was about a year after the Detroit race riots. It was a very interesting experience for me, though I only lasted about 2 1/2 weeks there. It paid okay for the time, not great, maybe $1.50 an hour. It was truly horribly stinky and dark in the factory itself. I lived with Tom and my sister Diane, and they were pretty reasonable people. They had one child, my nephew JR who was 3, and Diane was pregnant that summer.

I remember being there, I had no music of my own, though I was obsessed with rock and roll at the time. Tom Bubnar's taste were not overwhelmingly good or bad, he just didn't have much stuff. He did have several Johnny Cash lps that I got pretty into in that short period of time. In particular Orange Blossom Special. My knowledge of country music at that point was very spotty, but I did know that Johnny Cash had stood up for keeping Bob Dylan on at Columbia records in 1963, and that meant a lot to me as I was a major Dylan freak.

But I was emotionally on edge at this time. I was removed from everything I knew, far away from Wichita and my social scene, and generally not happy living in that house, though the people seemed pretty okay. They just weren't in the same part of the world that I was, socially and politically. The Bubnars were old school republicans (and are to this day), and I was already pretty much a radical leftist who would eventually come home to the democratic party.

That exile ended in a screaming fight with Tom Bubnar in which I scraped the skin off of some of my face in an act of dramatic communication and self destruction. It did get Diane to take my complaints seriously, and she and Mother and Kathy decided to palm me off on Kathy, my oldest sister, one of the most self centered people in all existence. She drove to Detroit from St. Louis and picked me up and took me back to St. Louis where she installed me in the men's dorm at St. Louis U. (where Kathy was working on her masters degree) and she got me a job with the registrar, Lou Falkner. Paid $1/hour and I spent the rest of the summer re-filing files into one file. Old transcripts. There were tens of thousands of them. I worked by myself in a warehouse on Laclede street and I often just ran off and wandered around mid-town, while ostensibly on the clock.

I didn't eat very carefully in this period of time. I can't remember if I got to eat in the cafetaria at the dorm, or whether I mainly fed myself. I do remember going without food for days at a time. I lived in numerous rooms in the dorm that summer. It was Griesedicke Hall, the men's dorm. The Dick, as it was known. I mainly lived in the upper floors. I thought a lot about suicide that summer. Actually, most of my life there has been a background meditation on suicide. And I have made several relatively serious attempts at it. The most recent was in September of 1993, when Becky Bradway turned out to be having an affair (at least in her mind) with Kevin Stein, the current poet laureate of the great state of Illinois. In any case, that summer of 1968, I had already made a couple of feeble attempts at suicide in Wichita and on the road.

Sometimes I think that's why that James Taylor song had such an impact at the time, that nearly everyone I knew, in my generation, had thought abut suicide or knew somebody who had done it. My best friend in high school years, Tom Bezzi, tried to kill himself with an overdose of pills when he was on a bus trip in northern Oklahoma. He had gone to Notre Dame, per his mother's desire for a catholic boy education, and had fallen in love with his roommate there and had had to acknowledge his homosexuality. I always knew he was gay, but in those days that was a pretty devastating thing to admit to yourself. And since it was still a mental illness his folks had him put into a mental institution for nearly a year. Crazy, they were the crazy ones. "Just yesterday morning/they let me know you were gone/Susanne the plans they made/put an end to you..."

Notes on Scarritt People, Adkins and Hulvey

2011-02-08T12:48:00.003-06:00

From the memory pit.

Gary William Adkins. This piece is resurrected from my poetry blog. Having given Adkins time to respond to this information, and having been completely ignored for more than ten years, I feel free to publish whatever I have to say about that time and his role in it.

I was good friends with this guy on and off for a decade. It's amazing though how well you can think you know someone and then realize they have done something you have no understanding of whatsoever. So Adkins was a big part of the Scarritt scene, and long term close friend of Ross Hulvey. He also had sexual relationships with a couple of Scarritt people, Gael Cox and Sandy Riseman. He went to Hollins College in Virginia, after Davidson went there, in the mid 1970s (along with Ross Hulvey, his gradeschool friend). And he wrote the other pretty successful novel ms. from that group, The Horror At Ceal Springs. Along the way he played some banjo music and generally did his best Mark Twain imitation.

I came back to this poem (folk music), which I wrote about four years ago, because it needs work, still needs work though it is better than it was, and because of all the things that happened in my life, the way Adkins simply slipped away confuses me the most of all. He married in 1980 in Virginia, to a woman who apparently was so self-centered and full of her own needs that she couldn't be bothered to actually meet and interact with any of Gary's friends, despite having moved to his hometown from Pennsylvania. Karen. So, right away we are clear on the facts here: He married someone who took control of his life. Later on he came to work for the Illinois School Boards Association where Jessica the witch Weber Billings was the editor. Gary ended up taking over that job, after Jessica escaped to New Mexico.

In some correspondence with Jessica this last year, and that is a story in itself, she told me that Adkins was essentially an alcoholic these days and had broken all social contacts with anyone from that time, including John Knoepfle and more importantly Ross Hulvey. Gary had been very close friends with Ross from approximately the sixth grade, even in the early Karen years, he made time to see Ross. Well, age brings the recognition of your failure and I'm sure that Adkins has retreated to the comfort of his wife and dog. They didn't reproduce because his wife didn't want to. I remember him telling me in the 80s that he was sure Karen would come around on this issue, that she would eventually need to reproduce. But, she didn't. So he didn't ever have the children he talked incessantly about having. Just as well, clearly he couldn't be trusted to always be there.

At one time I really thought Gary Adkins was my best friend. What did I know? Really, not much, eh? I thought Janne loved me. I thought Knoepfle cared about my work. I thought Pat Smith thought I was a true artist. Pretty much none of this was true. Or maybe it was, but it changed. That is more likely, of course.

And some notes on Ross Hulvey, III.

This poem (born twice) is about Ross Hulvey the third. Early in his life, at nineteen, Ross had heart surgery. He had a fabulous scar from this event. He doubted his ability to survive for long, and cultivated a fairly gothic world view, a marked interest in Lovecraft and all things "eldritch".

In his mid-twenties he was suddenly given a clean bill of health and told he might live a long and normal life. At that point there was a remarkable change in him: he gave up his overalls and he shaved his beard. Also he began smoking pot as if there was no tomorrow, having been given ten thousand of them. In the 1970s several of the writers I knew spent time in the graduate writing program at Hollins College in Virginia. Richard Dillard was some sort of old friend of Knoepfle's and John kept sending people over there to write. Ross went with his old friend, Gary Adkins. It was a good deal for them as Hollins is, on the undergraduate side, a girls' school. So there were plenty of available females there.

Naturally, Ross fell deeply in love with a girl named Heidi. Unfortunately her father intervened. Ross was too old for Heidi; he was unsuitable. Well. To be honest, he probably was. There was a long period where Ross got past the emotional devastation of losing Heidi. Part of what helped him through that was a weird relationship with Jessica Weber. Jessica took Ross on, not exactly as a boyfriend, but sort of.

She told me, and I have this written down in an old notebook, that in reality she was out of Ross's league. But she herself had been dumped by a guy who turned out to be dying in his thirties because, he told her, she wasn't special enough to be his last love. I've often wondered if that was why she let Ross hang around for year after year.

In any case, Ross eventually met, had an affair with, and married a girl named Julie who ran a bookstore with her sister-in-law and mother-in-law, Trilogy Books. Of course that came to an end when the partners discovered that she was cheating on their son/brother with Ross. Julie and Ross married after the divorce came through.

Julie had a child from the previous relationship. Ross was really always too selfish to have a child himself. He was a child, himself, in many ways. He was cheap, and selfish to the max. Yet he was also a repository of much fun and weird information. What he wasn't was a writer. In all the time I knew him, fifteen or twenty years, he wrote two or three stories and the mildest beginning of a novel. One of these stories, The Gerber Syndrome (Cosmic Circus), was about a man trying to commit suicide by enacting a crime horrible enough to bring back the death penalty (in the UK where this was set). He settles on stealing an infant and eating that child. After he has done this he realizes he now has something so wonderful to pursue that he wants to go on living. Yes, a weird, grim piece, but darkly funny.

I pointed Ross to a magazine called Cosmic Circus, and sure enough the piece was printed, and eventually reprinted in a best of collection. It is still available today. Google it and you will see. Ross' father died in his early sixties in 1986. Ross himself must be nearing sixty, same as me, now, and I wonder if he is thinking about leaving the world. I know I am. I wonder what it all means. Oh, and Ross, when I knew him, owned maybe 15,000 books, 3,000 records and a 1,000 movies and the hardware to play them all. Lots of odd stuff. There is a discography of the Fugs (Ed Sanders wonderful beatnik rock group) on the net that Ross compiled.

Back to Adkins:

Adkins was depressed about women and about his future. He had hoped to write and publish books, but ended up being a shill for a Springfield lobbying group. It was marrying that girl Karen that took him away from the work. At least it looks so in retrospect. The really sad part of his story is that he always wanted to have children. We always joked that his girlfriends had "wide, childbearing hips," and they did. Karen too. Unfortunately for him she didn't want to have kids. I remember him telling me that she'd change, as the years went by, and she would want some kids. Didn't happen. I hear they have a dog. Well, nothing wrong with that. Still, you wonder what happens to people. I also wonder what he had to do to be one of Jessica the witch's minions. Something, I am sure.

I myself was pretty damned depressed at the time. Still, the piece has a certain gritty desire lingering in it.

As the Nation's Mind Begins to Fragment

2011-02-08T11:11:00.005-06:00

There are just too many weird ass bits of kharma rocking through current America. Let's take a quick look:

Bristol Palin's autobiography is listed on Amazon, though it doesn't have a title yet.

Don the gunboy Rumsfeld's memoir is out and it is a self serving piece of crap, as we knew it would be. But in it he whines about, among others, John McCain, giving McCain a chance to whine back. These guys got us into and supported the war in Iraq. How many dead American boys and girls? How much of the deficit belongs to the two of them?

But never mind. Glenn Beck, who gets 2 million viewers and not even in prime time, says that the liberals want the islamists to take over in Egypt, despite the fact that the white house is currently supporting the biggest official terrorist in Egypt, the military's choice for president. But, that means nothing to Glenn and people who like him. They like the story of the end times better. Beck's entire schtick is really armageddon. There is always a large audience hoping for the end.

That way they won't have to deal with their own failure.

It is a really scary freaky time. What will happen? The odds are pretty long that the rich will just get a buttload richer and hire private armies to keep themselves safe while the rest of us starve. When all the gold is taken and kept by the king and his barons the peasantry eventually figures it out and starts complaining. In the old days they would make them go to war to keep them confused. That doesn't work now. It will be interesting to see where the desire to have a good life takes americans, particularly after the 60+ generation dies off in ten to twenty years.

One thing is certain, Fox News will eventually be found to bear the entire responsibility for the loss of the American Empire. It will be discovered that all the billionaire boys behind the rightwing and the tea partiers actually spend most of their time in the playgrounds of the rich, in Europe and Eurasia. They are completely countryless. Their only real commitment is to their personal fortunes. To capital, in any case.

And now that "communism" has been proven to be a failure, is it really surprising that "capitalism" is also, a failure. Pretty funny. The Chamber of Commerce is doing its best to end the America that existed in the minds of its members.

And when the republicans do repeal the right of a woman to choose how to use her own body, will they also try and restrict chemical methods of birth control? And what about sodomy, in general? The rich guys like it, we know that. But the crazy xtians are terrified of all sex and sexuality.

So the big question this year, who's going to retire from the Supreme Court? The most interesting possible storyline in this land of the truly weird would be if Clarence Thomas had a stroke and had to step down. That would setup Obama to fill the "black" seat. That would be a truly hilarious and, pardon the pun, dark piece of political theatre. There's always a bit of a race war brewing in the American south (and other places, too). This would stir that pot. Be some serious fun.

3/5's

2011-01-19T12:41:00.002-06:00

Notational funk here. I've been up all night, leaning on the window sill. The constant accumulation of details is inevitably obscuring all that I thought I knew. Facebook exists as a sort of shorthand of trivial relationships. Many people that I know and love are on the FB, and I do get minor bits of information about other people's lives from it. I'm not against it. But the substantive conversations of my youth seem gone forever now. We exist primarily to reproduce and support our interest mates in our interests. Not that I'm spoiling for an argument. But it would be nice if there were some sense of heading toward synthesis in the intellectual fabric of the country.

So, I am a patriot, a believer in the founding document and the upper class white guys that got us away from the British monarch and his need for funds. They had ideals, and they knew at heart that that slavery thing was going to come back and bite them in the ass. Looking back on it now, from this great vantage, it is clear that allowing slavery to exist stained the republic in basic ways and that that stain is still there.

And the irony of this is so very great. Those treasured words, "all men are created equal", given the lie by the founding paper. It was written that some men were worth 3/5s, and not to vote, but to count for "representation." They could be represented, not fully, and they had no voice, whatsoever, in that representation. And that representation always promoted policies that kept those human beings, those men (and women), in captivity. In labor for someone else's monetary success.

What conservatives never really get is this: Money to them means worth, value, measured by the market. Money to me and to most average people, means the hours I spend of my life doing work for someone else so that they will give me the money I need to eat and to have a place to live. Money for me is my labor. Money for Newt Gingrich is the current value of his stock portfolio.

Now, these things are not mutually exclusive. That is why the value of a psychiatrist's time is $300 for an hour and the value of my time is not close to a tenth of that. Market creates value. Like my daddy always said, things wouldn't be so expensive if people wouldn't pay so much for them. He was right, but that statement overlooks one other basic fact of being: You don't have the option of not eating, or not having heat/electricity, or not having water and garbage service. These are things that are ultimately necessary for life. So people pay what they must. And the Market? Does it help us all? Or does it ultimately only help those who have the collected means to create and farm the labor of the average?

So the southernors, the aristocracy of Gone with the Wind, made their initial fortunes from the unpaid labor of a bunch of humans, stolen from their own land, and then used and bred, like farm animals, for the fortune of white men in the south of this great land. Those fortunes still exist for the most part. Once a fortune is started it mostly stays alive and grows unless it is administered by someone who is self destructive. As is obvious from Paris Hilton, even the stupidest rich kid can coast forever on the family funds.

But, as those fortunes still exist, so does the need to justify them in the first place. And that need is the parent of all anti-black bigotry in the land of Jefferson. Those in the south, out of guilt and greed, tell themselves that black folk aren't that smart and we gave them so much by turning them into slaves. We gave them our religion and we gave them our civilization. Aren't they lucky?

I imagine it must be quite a shock for them when they die and cross over and among the first things they come to understand about reality is what a huge and destructive lie they have told themselves. It must be painful in a way that cannot be imagined. The humorous part is that they all will have had the chance in their life to admit to this lie and thus avoid the specification of their guilt and its pain.

So the Tea Party is mainly about race and guilt and fear. These people at heart are basically afraid that I am right. Guess what, I am right about this. They will all die and when they die and cross over they will confront this truth. May the Lady help them see their way clear to forgiveness and penance.

Well, catholic concepts. You never lose the bullshit you grew up with. But you can discover its truths, its falsehoods, and its uses.

May the Lady look upon this day with mercy and love.

Sara P., Blood Libel? No, Blood Lust

2011-01-12T12:07:00.003-06:00

Sara Palin today said that blaming her for any violence at all would be a "blood libel", analogous to blaming the jews for using gentile baby's blood in their bread. What we see here is not someone to lead us back together, but, rather, someone to bring on a new civil war. I think we can all agree that Ms. Palin has a clear biblical need to foment a righteous conflagration, leading to the End of Times.

The only real question is, are there enough Americans and billionaires who share this apocalyptic desire? Is the end of our world clearly in sight? And I don't mean the end Sara believes will come. I don't see Yeshua striding into view anywhere, and even if he did show up I know in my heart that Ms. Sara is not the Queen Esther he would see.

But, an end to what has been the successful experiment in democracy that is the United States of America. That I can see as a possibility. For a democracy to have even half a chance of sustaining itself it has to be capable of tolerating a diverse spectrum of views without violence or violent rhetoric.

This is really what this last weekend's shooting brings up. I don't believe Lougher was anything more than a crazy, insane person who adapted weird language and tried to create a world in which he had some sort of personal value. But, because he targeted a woman who had been target, metaphorically to be sure, by SaraPac and her friends on the increasingly scary right, he has brought about a conversation he probably doesn't even know about.

And the fact that Ms. Sara could come out today and proclaim herself a victim, like the jews of old, of lies and inuendo and fail to note what most people understand is her relationship to this weird moment in time, simply tells us of the level of personal deceit that must live in her.

I believe that most of the time Sara Palin can convince herself of whatever she needs to believe to continue on to this goal she has of becoming President and helping the rightwing Israelis re-establish the ancient biblical kingdom of the House of David. This is an absolute pre-requisite for the End of Days.

And that is, beyond the money and fame and personal egotism so totally on display, the one actual deep thought the woman has ever had. She has faith, no doubt. She almost certainly believes that anything she needs to do to gain this dream is okay with the Lord God. The fact that her vanity and ego keep her from seeing that to really accomplish this political task she would need to court the broader spectrum of humans in this still democratic country tells us that she isn't really being driven by the higher force. The higher force, or even a moderately good advisor, would have had her make a very different statement today.

I think it is very likely that she will end up the nominee for the repubclicans in 2012. For my money I would welcome that because I think it is very unlikely that she could go on to beat Barack Obama. But, because all things are possible in this world, and because she has several billionaire backers that could pump literally hundreds of millions of dollars into her campaign, I would surely hope the republicans nominate pretty much anybody else.

I think only Sara Palin, of all the possible presidents we could have, only Sara P. would bring on the great war that would end this civilization. I think she would support Israel and Israel's use of tactical nuclear weapons. From there things would escalate very quickly throughout the world.

Esther she ain't. But Esther she believes herself to be.

It is a weird and terrible time. The rightwing is becoming a mob. And an armed one at that. Four republicans in Arizona resigned party posts today, the chief among them explaining that he would "take a bullet for no one." He had been opposed by Tea Party people who emailed him and phoned his house with threats. This is evil and it is all over this country. Read any rightwing blog's comments section. And then tell yourself that they cleaned up the really bad ones, the ones from people perhaps as crazy as Loughner.

I ask the Lady for Her mercy. Let the rabid dogs find some sort of peace in their own lives.

Two Pieces, One Review, One Complaint & Confession

2011-01-05T10:40:00.004-06:00

Collected Poems — Pat Smith

The thing that is getting to me right now is that I got a copy of Pat Smith's Collected Poems in the mail. Apparently after Pat died, John, her husband and someone I knew very well forty years ago, went through her stuff and decided to publish a book. He did a fairly good job, though I knew Pat well enough to know there are several poems in this book she would never have published, due to inconsistent quality. Anyway,t here are several small essays in the book, from people who knew Pat well. And I knew all these same people well, too. But I am so not included here. Though one of the actual poems even mentions my name. Must've killed John to put that one in. I'd say at least twelve of the 150 poems are specifically about me;mostly truly bitter. Most of the poems were definitely written during the days we lived on Scarritt and just after. From 1973-1981. I knew most of these pieces when they were first written.

Anyway, I read the whole book last night. I have really mixed feelings about this book and these poems. Some of them are quite good; Pat is a lot like the great american poet, Ann Sexton (who if you've never read you should; Transformations, where she retells grimms stories in a modern idiom). When she's good Pat is spare and clean and gets you right there. But a lot of the time her pieces fall flat. Of course that's the problem with publishing everything. It will include the less successful pieces.

And anyway the whole thing harks back to those days. I have fulsome record of those days. I have notebooks and copies of my letters from those days and those were days I really wrote letters and got letters back. I have literally hundreds and perhaps thousands of letters from that time period. And I have lots of Pat's writing that John clearly doesn't have. Not that he'd ask me, of course. You see, John was having an affair with Pat, his across the street neighbor and the wife of his colleague at the University, Larry, when I first met her. And within a year she had left Larry and started living with me. I didn't know about her affair with John until after we were living together. Well, he was pissed off at me, though he proposed that we have a three way sometime. Which Pat would not do (though later I was in two menage a trois with Pat, one extra male, one extra female). Actually Larry, Pat's husband, also proposed a three way at that time. My life as a sex object, eh?

And another thing, Pat speaks in several of these poems to Janne H., who she did her best to keep me away from all those years. So I guess she ended up with the Janne card. Janne is credited as being among the people who ponied up to print this sucker.

Of course, Pat has her father to write about and some of the most winning pieces are those. He must've been a shattered man, after finding his wife dead in their airstream, a victim of suicide by barbiturate when Pat was 13. Thus leading to another strong theme for her: suicide. Of course she was not allowed to commit suicide, because of what her mother had done. It certainly fucked up that family. But she talks about it quite often in these pieces, or about death in general. Death is a conversation she is having with herself. She always talked about her internal monologue. "The dark night of the soul" was a favorite expression. She had real specific things she loved, but she was really pretty closed off to new ideas. She was a C.S. Lewis freak, which is only marginally better than being an Ayn Rand freak.

She once had an argument with, among other people, Janne, about how the clothes that women wear cause sexual violence to happen to them. From her point of view she was speaking pragmatically, but to Janne and the other women she was blaming the victim. I was not on her side in that particular debate. She was a product of her time, 14 years older than Janne and a world away in experiences. To her credit Pat had an affair with a black guy at ISU in the mid 1950s. And to his credit, her father didn't exactly disapprove; he just worried about her safety. It was a dangerous affair for 1956, and thus even more romantic.

Anyway, it opens up yet another can of weirdness from the life I have led.

I'll probably spend at least a couple of weeks getting through this one. There's a part of me that wants to impose my recollection of this history of this small group of people from forty years ago. Maybe I should do that. I suppose I'll have to get another job and make enough money to publish my own book of poems. I don't quite know what I think about all this.

Part Two

Here are some thoughts about the book of Pat Smith's poems that John Knoll put out recently. I acquired it online and have read it a couple of times this last week. Naturally I have extensive weird thoughts about it. Part of what I feel about it has to do with what happened to that scene. How I feel cut out of it by Peg and John Knoepfle. How my mistakes seem to loom so much larger than Pat's, or anyone else's. Ric Amezquita forced Becky Bradway one time, but they all hang out with him, even Becky. Pat slept with her husband's colleague. Janne had numerous affairs with many men over the many years we knew her, mostly while she was married.

Most of the poems were things Pat wrote during the Scarritt Occasional Society days. There are a number of late poems she wrote to Knoll that I didn't recognize, but most of the stuff I was already familiar with. I wonder why John felt the need to expose these things? There are a double handful of poems that are about or directed to me. Mostly they are about need and betrayal. The usual stuff.

And there are several short essays: Sandy Martin, Harry Martin (yes, he's her brother, the priest; he married me the first time I was married in 1970 in St Lou to Becky McGovern, Joel's mom), and Jessica Billings (Weber), oh and Peg Knoepfle. What got me about all these pieces is that they were all surprised to find Pat wrote poetry and was good at it. Yikes. And they were her friends?! Sangamon Poets even put out a book of her poems in 1979, The Museum is Closed.

So there's a poem in this collection that is dedicated to J.R./J.H. I assume JR is John Ranyard. And JH, the omnipresent nemesis chick in my life, Janne H. Actually there are two other poems in the book to Janne. It is pretty humorous, as often as Pat gave me shit about Janne and as often as they were headed in basically opposite directions and had very different ideas. What brought them together was, of course, me.

But I get absolutely no credit in this book for the role I played. And it was not an insignificant role. I suppose I look back on that time now and I can see it was important in my life and maybe in some other people's lives, but the way I have been excised from it, particularly by the Knoepfles, is very painful to me.

Nonetheless, I believe now and I actually believed in the old days, that Pat would've been a great deal better off with John Knoll. If he had left Sandy in 1973, I think Pat would've left Larry. They were screwing for a couple of years before I showed up. Yet Pat didn't tell me about that until she had to, since she had promised John she'd go spend the night with him after she had started living with me. And then there was suddenly, for me, the whole affair with John Knoll. And so, John's wife at the time, Sandy, writes a glowing essay about Pat. Well, they were best friends and colleagues for several years there. Still its all weird.

And John Knoll was a complete bastard there for awhile. I remember Sandy saying she was divorcing him because she thought he was crazy and she didn't want to get stuck with being responsible for him. And Pat was freaked out and hurt by him at that time, 1973-74. He had that whole I'm like Nixon trip (remember Watergate was breaking).

But, clearly, from his writing about her, and from everything I know, Knoll was always the guy she should've been with. And I don't know that I think those years I spent being supported by her and writing unpublished books were particularly worthwhile for me. I think it let me blow off my twenties and eventually I came to realize that Pat didn't think much of my writing. That was devastating. It made what I was doing, living off of her, a terrible selfish thing and I had no choice but to leave her then. (I will say that in 1981 Pat had started a novel which was clearly based on her affair with John Knoll; she wrote about fucking him every day, in the garage, in the closet, on the back stairs, stuff I remembered and knew about.) And then I started working, doing the shitty jobs I should've done before, in my early thirties.

And Pat navigated a careful path around the Tim and Janne story. She cultivated Janne as a friend, but she pointed out things about her to me. A strange little rondo to be doing, the three of us. So now, Janne puts up part of the money to publish Pat's book, a book that is being produced by one of Janne's old lovers. Yes, Janne slept with John Knoll in 1972-73, while Pat and I were living in Chicago. And John called us up to tell us all about it. He particularly liked telling me how many orgasms Janne had and how she sounded when she had them. Yahoo. He was in his "I'm a complete asshole" stage at the time.

But, I think John loved Pat for real and I wish I hadn't gotten between them at a bad time. I think we would all have been better off. But, I loved her too. Of course, it is unlikely there would've been a Scarritt Occasional Society, or at least that particular configuration. I couldn't have funded the ongoing salon that we had. Pat had middle class money and I had none. I had an ex-wife and a little boy I should've paid a lot more attention to. Yes. It would've been better.

And since I don't get any of the credit for Scarritt, as far as I'm concerned I think the 1970s basically fucked me over. What have I got to show for my life? Two ex-wives named Becky, and some boxes of badly written novels and a bunch of poetry that pretty much only John Ranyard and Sandy Riseman have ever read.

But my kids aren't too fucked up because of me. That is something.

Bristol Palin, Cheaters' choice.

2010-11-23T12:54:00.002-06:00

Bristol Palin. What a terrible name. No wonder she's had so much trouble getting to adulthood. Got to feel sorry for that child she has macerating out there somewhere in Alaska-land. Bristol herself is about to win Dancing With the Stars, because, although billed as a dance competition, we have always secretly known it is primarily a popularity contest, pretty much like president of the united states.

Anyway the most fun part of this charade is that lots of rightwing sites have actually written and published online how they gamed the system for voting at DWTS, and cheated like crazy! People have said online that they have deliberately cheated so Bristol can win. That does explain how such a bad dancer could get to the finals.

It also explains everything you need to know about the rightwing in America. They yak endlessly about their principles, but when push comes to shove, they don't actually have any.

And Bristol, if she were actually principled, would not want to win this way and would disavow people cheating on her behald. Cue Bristol: " !" Yes, she has nothing. Nor does her mother, a true example of American womanhood as it has come to be respected by those who belief a wife should be subservient to her husband.

When you get right down to it all this crap is about money and power. The people that love Bristol and her mom are primarily sneaky selfish folks who would do whatever they could to improve their own position in life and society, even and especially, if it costs somebody else (preferably somebody "of color", as they might say; tho SP herself has been quoted using the "n word" as the MSM so coyly puts it anymore). The Tea Partiers are simply out to impose what they want on the rest of us and to keep from having to pay for any of the costs of living in the USA.

So when Bristol becomes Queen of the Hop all of America will look at her, one third with pride and glory, and two thirds with distaste. And another reality show will become that much less interesting. I quit watching after the first season when they stiffed the front runner for the sake of popularity. It was that guy who played the man who ran the company that Julia Louis Dreyfuss worked for on Seinfeld. He was a great dancer but he got screwed. It was clearly not right.

Nobody will be surprised when the cheater takes home the prize. That's America today. Cheaters often win, particularly Republican ones.

Bristol Palin, Cheaters' choice.

Just a Jealous Guy

2010-10-20T09:23:00.002-05:00

We all miss John Lennon. He was a good person who tried hard to overcome his own flaws. He was at least honest about things, a rarity in this world. I particularly love the song "Jealous Guy" on the Imagine album. It always seemed to me to be an attempt to make up for "Run for Your Life" on Rubber Soul, a scary threatening piece about the same emotion. And you could always see that he truly loved Yoko Ono with a great love, an enduring love. I do think she mother'ed him too, and that he craved that from his childhood. I haven't much respect for Paul, though I think Paul has struggled to be a good person. I love Ringo for his ordinariness, salt of the earth qualities. And George at least tried to live a life devoted to the spirit and to truth. I find it weirdly ironic that George wrote one of the greatest love songs anyone ever wrote, "Something" (Abbey Road), for the woman he loved (Patti Boyd), and yet still lost her to another man who wrote another of the greatest love songs anyone ever wrote, "Layla". Crazy. The heart is where your world truly exists. Keeping it honest is difficult.

As for Bob, he played here last Friday. I didn't go, but I respect the fact that the man keeps on playing, and changing and trying to deal with the vast landscape of America like he does. I've seen Dylan four or five times along the way, including back in 1969, with the Band, singing Little Richard songs. And I still tend to get his new work, although the last couple of things other people bought them for me. I listen to Leonard Cohen more these days; he's closer in style to my own work. But I still play Dylan. I will always love Blonde on Blonde, with its songs about Edie Sedgwick and Joan Baez, and of course Sara Lowndes. I used to always play "Sooner or Later One of Us Must Know" when I set up the stereo for the first time in a new place. It was tradition, but these days I can hardly bear to listen to that song; it represents such loss and betrayal. My wife, Kimberly, bought me a gold disc copy of Blonde on Blonde when we were first dating. And I always think of Patti Smith's poem about Edie Sedgwick and Baby Brian Jones, the true heroes of Blonde on Blonde she calls them. Brian Jones you may recall is the member of the Rolling Stones that they kicked out in 1968 and who was found dead in his swimmming pool and everyone assumed it was drug overdose, but thirty years later a guy who had been working on the house confessed on his deathbed that he'd murdered Jones. Brian Jones was responsible for that frisson of true rebellion in the early Stones music. After he was gone they became the arena type band that they are still today. Not the same, but still great.

I used to know and write about rock and roll quite a bit. In the 1970s I wrote a column, Plasticware, for a local rag in Springfield, IL (The Phoenix). I got some freebie records out of that. I still have in the neighborhood of 500-600 pieces of vinyl. One of my old friends bought me a turntable that plugs into your computer and lets you make mp3s out of the vinyl cuts and I did that for awhile, but it takes a long time and you have to cut things up and label them. So I didn't keep at it.

Somewhere along the way I ended up getting into white female jazz vocalists from the 1950s. They tend to be sort of obscure now. The aficionados of the 60s and 70s kept and remembered the African American ladies, Ella Fitzgerald, Sara Vaughan, Billie Holiday. The caucasian singers people remember tend to be those associated with the film industry, Doris Day, and Peggy Lee. I found a number of less known but great singers that I then collected: June Christy (who was born in Springfield and who went to Chicago when she was 16 to sing in the big bands, wwii era), Anita O'day (who used the pig latin for "dough" for her last name), and Chris Connor. I also have several items from the outer fringes of rock and roll, particularly the project that Judy Henske and her husband Jerry Yester (who was with the Lovin' Spoonful and produced the Byrds) did, Farewell Aldebaran (look this one up on Wikipedia) on Zappa's Straight records. One of the greatest discs from the 1960s. Along with the LA group Love's Forever Changes, and Brian Wilson's teenage symphony to god, Smile. Just transcendent stuff.

I've also always loved the brit folk stuff, Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Maddy Prior, Richard Thompson. I have played Steeleye since the 1970s and still do. Of course, more modern times include Loreena McKinnett and Enya and the Medieavel Baebes. I originally was deep into folk music at the beginning, Peter Paul and Mary and Joan Baez and Dylan and Phil Ochs. I was also always into show music, particularly Stephen Sondheim's stuff, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, West Side Story, Gypsy, Into the Woods, Company, Sweeney Todd, and especially Assassins. I love lots of other broadway stuff, also and have done several musicals in my life. I think Les Miserable may be the greatest. But I like Andrew Lloyd Webber's work, Evita, Phantom, and especially Sunset Boulevard. I like the film that that is based on very much, Bill Holden and Gloria Swanson, in a Billy Wilder piece.

There's a new book out about Dylan, Greil Marcus's collected pieces from the last forty years. I started reading Marcus in the late 1960s and have read him ever since. Good stuff. There are many Dylan books, including his own book which is very different than what people write about him. He's still an enigmatic figure. I think he has been seriously wounded in the heart, but mostly it is self inflicted. Men who are on the road have a difficult time remaining faithful. That's not an excuse, just a recognition of the biological drive. Anyway, Dylan is very romantic about women, typical for someone from a very patriarchal background. Me too, though I fight my inherent sexism. I was lucky enough in the 1960s to read several specific feminist tomes that have formed a basis for my thinking: Kate Millett's great study Against Our Will, Mary Daly's wonderful Gyn/Ecology, and of course Andrea Dworkin's Pornography. Also Robin Morgan's Sisterhood is Powerful. And at base, even before these books I read Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex, a remarkable book even today. I was looking at it last year again. I have a young friend (well, he turned forty so I guess he's not that young, but he started coming to my writing group when he was 18 and he is a lot like a young Truman Capote) who is hung up on the relationship between Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

That was good stuff to go through in my callow youth. Not that I haven't seriously fucked up with the female side of the species along the way. I also have the roman catholic background and the essential misogyny of the culture itself. There's my tricky relationship with Margaret, and with my sisters. And then the spectrum of being that was my three marriages and the woman I lived with for 8 years, though she was married to my adviser. Not to mention the teenage girl in the 1970s. Many serious errors. I once contemplated writing a book that I was going to call "Sins Against Women", the premise being that I had committed most of them, once. That is, I tried to learn from my errors, but inevitably made new ones.

Well, I fully expect to face my errors when I come to the River in the afterlife. Whether it's facing that guy with the feather of truth, or seeing the movie of the really embarrassing parts of my life, I understand that I have an implicit need to see/hear/live the truth and that is the true nature of whatever one wants to call the afterlife, heaven, desire, hell, the akashic record. I struggle to deal with my own failings, but I celebrate the Lady and this world that is Her trousseau. May I just be of some service to Her, if only in recognizing Her great love and the mercy of the song.

Voting in Mississippi, Guns and Penis Extenders

2010-10-19T10:25:00.002-05:00

Mississippi didn't ratify the 19th amendment, women's suffrage, until 1984. I wrote that to my cousin recently and she asked whether that meant women couldn't vote in that state until the 1980s. I wrote back to her:

"As for Mississippi, after an amendment is ratified by enough states it becomes the law of the land, even if some of the states hate it. The 19th amendment was ratified fairly quickly by enough states and became law, even though most of the southern states passed laws saying they would never accept it. Eventually of course they all ratified the amendment, but the very last to do so was Mississippi. I think the south has never really gotten over the blow to their machismo of losing to the north in the civil war. There are plenty of people there, still fighting that war because of their pride. Not unlike the way the Arabic cultures continue feuds over generations because of family honor. For the rest of us time passes and other things take our attention. It's amazing though, how prevalent through history this sort of long term pride thing is. I read Wikipedia entries all the time. The nature of my part time job is that I spend a lot of time sitting in front of the computer waiting for the next task. So I read about history often. And it's mostly about people's money and people's pride. And their prejudices and attitudes color whoever they are seeking to overcome.

We all like to believe things that support our initial point of view. I think it is always a struggle to discern the lies you are telling yourself. The one good thing I got out of catholicism was the old examination of conscience thing. I don't see it in terms of sin, though. I see it entirely in terms of finding out the truth and trying to live with that truth, no matter how hard it is.

As for violence, we are all part of nature and it is violent at heart, but as a herd animal we know that organizing and following the herd and having some rules for getting along makes all our lives safe and better. So I'm in favor of that. I don't have a large problem with guns per se, but I do think they need some regulation. I worked for Sturm Ruger (gun company; I was a computer guy there) in New Hampshire once, and I have met a lot of real gun nuts along the way. I think guns are for American men representative of the same ability to control your existence that abortion and birth control are for women. As a matter of fact I think those two things will never be successfully restricted in this culture. They are too tied up with that weird American catchword: freedom. The freedom to do the stupid thing. I have had lots of fun bringing this argument up to the gun nuts and to the political feminists. They truly squirm. But I think it is actually true. These things are coming from deep inside. That said, I've never had a gun and have no desire for one. When I was young I did some firearms training stuff, but was not a big thrill for me.

Of course I don't want a motorcycle either. I think of motorcycles as "penis extenders" because I think a significant number of those people who ride them are desperate to be "men", in whatever fantasy version they have going on in their consciousness. But, I have my own areas of maleness that I have learned to cope with.

Of course I grew up with Wichita, Kansas, where men have been wearing guns in bars for the last nearly hundred and fifty years. Getting drunk and packing heat certainly strikes me as a bad combination. But, I don't go to bars anyway. I quit when I quit smoking in the 1980s. Now, of course, you're not allowed to smoke in the bars, but those days are forever in my past.

Mid-Term Speculation; Vote Dem Anyway

2010-10-18T13:03:00.002-05:00

This is my 900th post on this blog. It started out as mainly politics, but then migrated to my life in general (thanks Andrew Sullivan for demonstrating that consciousness extends across many worlds). Finally a couple of years ago, my brother-in-law complained that I posted pictures of his children and that it wasn't safe. So I took my personal life stuff and moved it to an email blog that I send out maybe as often as once a week.

The irony is that now my brother-in-law is on Facebook and posts pictures of his children all the time. But, that's my life. Somebody is always telling me I'm wrong about something and five years later I discover they are doing it themselves.

Me, I'm a classic liberal, I try and fix things, fix myself. I have come to believe this is what Barack Obama is all about. He keeps trying to fix things. And of course things keep changing on him, or at least the way they are protrayed changes them. So in the consciousness of the volk he has never quite fixed anything. When the reality is that without Obama, and without the frantic work to save the economy, we would all be in the royal dumper right now. Plus, if McCaine had won, there'd be quite a significant war going on in Afghanistan. Wait, there is a war in Afghanistan.

I guess we will never know. But I do think that McCain might've gone along with Israeli plans to bomb Iran. And that would inevitably lead to a very interesting semi-world war. Not to mention a more probable police state in this geography.

So, my point is simple: The republicans are going to do what they can to get control back in DC next month. I don't think they will take the senate back, but the House is another question. In any case, they don't actually have any programs, or plans, whatsoever, except cut taxes and increase the deficit.

They will do their level best to make Obama look like the author of the nightmare they will produce for us. Mainly so they can beat him in 2012, and get back all the really plum payoff monies that they had under George W. It is so very clear that John Roberts was put on the Supreme Court to engineer the re-introduction of serious money into the electoral process, and that now the payoffs for the Republicans are going to be bigger and bigger from now on. Until the collapse of the civilization, of course.

The end times vision here is easy: rich people are incredibly stupid and always create the situation that destroys the culture. Marx wasn't right about much, but he did note that the more you starve the great mass of people, the higher the probability of social chaos. He thought it would lead somewhere, but of course, it just leads to barbarism and then another powerful cadre gets control and uses violence to keep its power.

Look for a much more empowered FBI and CIA, in the coming republican hegemony. I guess the real questin is this: If Obama is re-elected in 2012, will the military stage a republica themed coup d'etat? I think there is a medium good chance of this.

My other speculation about the body politic is this: If you make Obama into a failed presidency, why wouldn't you expect the african-american population to hold that against you forever and use it as the basis of true resistance? There are a lot more guns in the black community than there are among the white folks, no matter what the NRA says. And they have some ideas about how to use them.

But, vote democratic anyway. It's the right thing to do. Even if your candidate is a goofy twit like Alexi Giannnoulias. Even if he's a puddle jumper playing the middle like that famous Mormon boy, Harry Reid. Even if you know they opposed the health care reform act.

And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. Thanks John, we miss you.

Sharks of Desire

2010-10-01T12:27:00.002-05:00

We approach the mid-term elections and the news for those who would like to see reality is bad. We can see that the Chamber of Commerce is injecting literally millions of dollars into the elections to defeat Democrats. Never mind that this will put in place a republican government that will destroy what is left of the consumer base that commerce requires to continue growing. This is a classic example of the american ability to not think beyond the next profit statement.

As the republicans come back to power and destroy millions of more jobs and people's ability to pay for and buy things, what will the Chamber of Commerce do about it? They will urge us all to give more money to those who start and run businesses, with no thought that there won't be customers.

And the american voter will go along with this, splitting the culture into two parts, one tiny, those rich enough to have a middle class or better life, and one enormous, those of us unable to afford those things we could ten years ago.

The credit card companies will tie ever greater segments of the population to enormous debt that can't be paid off in their lifetimes. And then, as large population segments pass away in ten to thirty years and their estates can't cover their debt, then there will be further crisis in the banking industry. But by then there will be no way to support the banks. It will be untenable.

And about then the US Army and Air Force will be taken over by the xtian generals who already chomp at the bit to administer their version of a religious democracy, enforced by the power of the troops. Could it happen? Will it happen? Is it inevitable?

The problem is, when a people as a whole dismiss hard evidence, then the illusion as a whole is bound to founder. But, like in North Korea, as long as you have a large standing army that you can make enforce your weird version of reality, than things can limp along for decades. Of course, millions of your people starve, and millions more die with no healthcare and no retirement.

And this looks very much like what the republicans and the Chamber of Commerce are interested in creating.

I have long thought that rich people, who already have way more than they need or could ever spend, have a psychological desire to make the distance from the rest of us as great as possible, because it is the only way their egos can keep going. They are like the sharks of desire in the great waters of human life.

The Lady awaits them when they cross over, with truth, and of course, with justice.

Glenn Beck Shits His Pants for Dollars

2010-08-26T13:05:00.003-05:00

Letting the numbers down slowly here in Central Illinois. The news is full of fear. The recession will be a double dipper. The housing market is going to tank a lot more. The spectre of mass poverty is out there and will overtake many people in the states. What does this mean? More people watching Glen Beck and believing his version of history. Many among us don't know that Beck is on tv every day lying to millions of people about what really happened. He is shaping an understanding of the past that is untrue and that makes claims that cannot be supported.

To do this he is about to make a major speech on the site of Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech, and on the very same day, in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Beck is going to attempt to wrest history away from that vision of equality, and to use it to strip millions of dollars from the people he speaks to who are deathly afraid of what being honest might mean for their place in the world.

What it all gets down to is this: We should to be a country that was remarkably courageous. Now we grovel with fear every time a major republican/conservative figure opens their mouth and intones the end times scenario. And what is really pitiful is the remarkable lack of content there is there. Many things are bad, but the islamists are punks, torturing the old people of america. Most of the world is pretty clear on how stupid the whole thing is, but here in the States it is about getting power to get wealth. All the repubs know this, and most of the dems. But the dems are hampered by a weird need to stay close to the facts.

This is something the Republicans do not care about anymore. People like Sara Palin and Glen Beck represent the end of this country. The end of the american dream. And with that end will come actual poverty for the children and grandchildren of those tea partiers who foam at the mouth listening to Beck's lies and deceptions. They give their money to those who would end this constitutional democracy.

And perhaps it will come to the point where the country splinters.

Meanwhile, true science will poke along, knowing Darwin is right and the Universe is 15 billion years old or more. Meanwhile xtianity will stultify and splinter into those who can deal with the facts science presents and those who cannot get past their desperate need to believe in folk stories from their tribal groups. Islam will suffer this same fate. And if the religious people do win out and suppress real science with its bad news for their belief systems, then the human world will go into a true dark age, much the worse than the first one. People will learn how to lie about what they know is true. The worst kind of destruction a conscious animal can do to itself.

So, let us all pray for Glen Beck's subconscious to come into contact with the great universal consciousness that Jung posited. For in the river of being itself Beck can only confront his selfishness for the disingenuous use he has made of pieces of truth displayed in a certain way only to bring him money and power. And there is no lie worse than the lie you tell yourself to get over. That is the true nature of Sin.

So Beck, when you die, as you must, your deceit will be like a great wind that will blow you through the place outside of time, and you will confront everything you have caused to happen and will be forced to make it all good. That will shape all existence for you as far as I can see.

How can these people not understand the terrible cost they are going to pay? It really does underscore how they have nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus, his words and his actions. The hypocrisy of the xtians is only matched by the barbarism of those who control Islam in what was once the caliphate. These groups are related not just by the god they pretend to serve, but by their terrible desire to deny who we are and what we will be.

So, is religion ultimately the problem? And is it something that comes from a specific part of the brain? Was it meant as a tool and has the tool become perverted? You really have to wonder if we are as stupid as we appear.

Ranting again. It's been awhile.

At least I know the Lady loves me. I'll still be responsible for my deceit when I die. I struggle with that knowledge every day.

Looking forward to President Palin, Not!

2010-07-24T16:58:00.003-05:00

It's been almost a month since I wrote anything here. There's a reason for this: nobody reads this shit. And why should they? What do I have to say that makes any difference in this world now?

So it's Saturday and frankly I am looking forward to getting out of Dodge on Monday. We are driving to Chi-town and taking a plane to New Hampshire. Of course, my old friend Gary Davidson is leaving the day I'm getting in, so I won't see him this year. But, hey, another year will pass. Or not. WHO THE FUCK KNOWS?

Meanwhile the war with the fleas continues apace here in Urbana. There is no money left, now. I have spent nearly two hundred extra fucking dollars on the war with the fleas and then, when I went to pick up my prescriptions I was charged an extra fifty dollars. I suspect the rest of my life is gonna go like this: the nickel and diming of the machine, taking what little I have and destroying what is left of my existence.

Meanwhile my fellow citizens are so stupid they may give the house and senate back to the republicans this fall. That would frankly be very funny. But, for awhile of course Obama would run rings around these guys. He's just so much fucking smarter than John Boehner. How sstupid are the repbulicans??? So stupid it is amazing that they can field any candidates. How stupid are americans? So stupid they may actually vote for the very losers who created the situation we are in today.

Welcome to the real world, falling apart here in the states. At least in the UK the conservatives won, but they aren't insane. They bear almost no resemblance to the conservatives here.

And what is the real danger? Sara Palin. The xtianist candidate. Can she win? In the right circumstance. If she does win, is it time to move to Canada? You betcha!

Nora Metzger Jones, June 29th, 1950

2010-06-29T11:37:00.003-05:00

I admit, this is my birthday. Number sixty in the count on the great wheel of life. It is also Nora Metzger Jones' birthday. Sixty for her too, wherever she is. I met Nora at St. Louis University in 1969. We were both in the Honors Program, along with Jack Raymond Jones.

Jack was a pretty charismatic figure in those days. Eventually there came to be a group of people around Jack. You know, it was the sixties, and there was a lot of free thinking ripping around the general atmosphere.

We ended up in a semi-formal group, that Jack liked to call his "gesalt". Not gestalt, now. He left out the T. Why? At this late date, I am not that sure. But, knowing JJ he had a perfectly good reason. Anyway, we were college kids. Vietnam War was still going. Nixon was president. It was a wild time, for sure.

There were a few women who became involved in this scene. Monica Schaeffer, we called Monica Hippie. She had been the valedictorian of her class at Rosati Kain, the catholic girls high school on Lindell in St. Louis. Her mom was a teacher with the university, and she had a bunch of siblings.

And there was Becky McGovern, a good catholic girl from Peoria, who had been going to high school in Brussels, Belgium, where her father worked for Caterpiller Tractors.

Needless to say, all of the available women paired off with someone, and sex was had. Nora hooked up with Jack himself. That turned out to be a fateful event for all concerned.

Nora's folks came to town, during year two at SLU. They had Jack's records pulled by the Jesuits. You could do that in those days. They told Nora, she would have zombie children with Jack; that they would be retarded. They said they wouldn't pay for anything and she had to leave the man.

Nora, being Nora, not only didn't leave JJ. She married him, and had his child. Now, she had had an abortion earlier in this story arc. And it was neither cheap, nor good. This was pre-Roe v. Wade. And the procedure cost $700 and was performed by a mid-wife.

Naturally, it didn't go well. So, that summer, the summer of 1970, after I had married Becky McGovern, Nora married Jack on the 4th of July. We were all quite radical, but none more so than Nora. But what people forget, is that the radical lefties of the sixties were extreme patriots. So, the 4th of July. And Nora swore that she would conceive that night. To make a child for the Revolution!

And being Nora, she did. Unfortunately for the poor little thing, Nora went into labor at just six months, and after forty hours gave birth to Emil Zapata Jones. He lived a couple of months at Children's Hospital in St. Louis. And then two more months, with Jack carrying him around.

Nora was completely flipped out by this. I don't think she ever got over it. The last time I saw her, in the early 90s, she was still with Jack. I am sure they will always be together. Maybe even in another lifetime.

I loved Nora, for good or ill. She fucked over everybody to some extent, for what seemed to her passionate and good reasons. I hope she is well today, on our birthday, here in another millenia. May she find the Lady's mercy.

Why Are We In Vietnam? Er, Uh, Ahem, Afghanistan?

2010-06-28T12:01:00.002-05:00

Politics
Although I have always have a few political opinions (always), right now everything in the greater sphere boils down to the oil spill and the tragedy that it is for us all. I don't think most people really understand how deep this one will penetrate into the zeitgeist. I wish Obama well, but he actually isn't a superman who can swim down and cap the bastard. And he's inevitably hampered by the Republicans who are dragging their heels on everything, hoping to win back the House in the fall. If that happens then what change there has been will grind to a crashing halt.

President McCain
Still, you have to ask yourself, aren't you happy that McCain isn't President? Things are bad enough in Afghanistan without Johnny Boy committing another hundred thousand troops. I remember 1965 entirely too well. I saw McCain on tv yesterday and he basically said, pretty much out right, that Nixon lost Vietnam because the country forced him to say when we were going to leave and so the enemy waited for us to go away. I suppose this means that if McCain had his way, we'd still be in Vietnam, still keep trying to keep people in power that would do what we want. And what would we have gained from that? What did we ever get for those 50,000 dead American men and boys and women and girls who we sent over there, many against their own will, to fight and die? What did we get? What did we purchase with all that blood and treasure? Will someone please tell me?

And why would going on with that war have been a good thing for this country? See, people like McCain are absolutely committed to a macho ideal that you have to win, at all costs. These are the people that ruined sports, that made the athletes take steroids. These are the people that screwed the financial world to the wall with stupid derivatives, taking wild chances with everyone else's money. So they could win, you know. Win. It's all about winning, and its only about winning.

There is just no range in american thought anymore. It's all that slippery slope way of putting all arguments. I blame the gun lobby for starting this thirty years ago. But there is no doubt that the american right wing uses this tactic without a thought as to where it takes us. I just wish Bill Buckley were still here to see what he hath wrought.

Jimmy the Dude

2010-06-21T11:35:00.002-05:00

I'm pushing sixty hard, here. The days accumulate once again. It is summer solstice, longest day/shortest night of the year. There has been too much rain, people. But, we take what the world is and live with it, as best we can.

I joined Facebook recently. Mainly to access prom pictures from New Hampshire. Once on it, I got all sorts of connections going on. I think it's a good thing, though I can see that it can be easily abused. Still, it's one of those things that the numbers are against.

Part of what happens in this new world, is you are abruptly faced with bits of a previous life. Are you a different person now? Is the person you are suddenly reconnected to a different person? What does it matter? Why must it mean something?

So anyway I ran across my friend, Jim Kuhnlein. Jimmy the Dude. Jimmy and I shared an apartment in the summer of 1969. Neither of us had a job, we had very little money. The apartment was the $15/week ashtray. So called because it was filthy and we all smoked in them days. I remember crawling around, looking for change, so we could go get a pack of marlboros.

We ate a lot of hotdogs, cooked over the open gas flame of the tiny stove. The place actually had several rooms. We were storing a lot of people's stuff over the summer between year one and year two of college.

Mainly we stayed up at night. It was mighty warm during the day. We smoked a lot of hashish that Magic Michael dropped on us when he visited from Louisville. We talked a great deal about women and both of us lusted after the fifteen year old little sister of our friend Monica Hippie, Maria. She was a sweetie, but out of our league, not to mention too young (remember however that we ourselves were only 18-19).

I can remember taking psilocybin with Jimmy that summer and watching the sun come up on the dome of the catholic cathedral over on Lindell. Man, we were horny.

I spent that summer writing a novel, It Seems So Long Ago (title courtesy of Leonard Cohen). It was an apocalypse novel, set in a post-nuclear war america. It was written in an extreme surrealistic style that was later ruined by John Knoepfle. Too bad, it was jolly fun. And pretentious? Oh my.

Jimmy had long hair, and a good mustache. He also had a great cape, and a good hat with a bronze and aquamarine hat band. And boots. Let us not forget the boots. There was a reason Jim was known as "the Dude". He had great clothes I think from working for a clothing store in, maybe Ohio?

Later on Jim married his high school sweetheart, a woman named Toni. And they lived in Middletown, Ohio, just down the way from Dayton. I think they lived in Dayton, too. In any case, I drove over there a number of times when Joel was little, with Becky McGovern. Later they split up. So many of the couples from that time did.

Anyway, I ran into Jimmy on Facebook and there was his picture. And he doesn't really look much different for it being 30-40 years later. He lives in Kansas City area these days and is married to someone named Pandora. She seems nice to me. I hope so. Jimmy was a very sweet guy. He had all of the Stone Poney's albums and worshipped Linda Ronstadt. Phil Dick, the sci fi writer, had that same trip re Lindy Lou.

I remember Jimmy telling me about the Magical Mystery Tour and Paul is dead in one of the stairwells at Walsh Hall, when we both still lived in the dorm at St. Louis U.

May the Lady bless him and his Pandora. May the Lady's love and Her mercy be sung for us all this strange time in America.

Israel Blows It Yet Again

2010-06-02T09:42:00.004-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

So the legitimate government of Israel, using lawyer-speak, caused an act of piracy to take place in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea. They sent their thuggish military down ropes onto the Turkish ships that sought to get passed the blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Upon arrival, amazingly enough, the people on the ships felt they were being attacked! So they fought back! Israel said they had all kinds of serious weapons, and that justified the Israelis using deadly force. A bunch of people were shot dead. None of them Israelis, of course.

So, this then creates this question in my mind, does the government of Netanyahooo, as I like to call him, believe that they are allowed to board and capture any ship sailing in those seas, as long as they proclaim, in advance, that the act is lawful? What about the pirates off the eastern coast of Africa? Can they then legitimize their activities by proclaiming those ships passing through as running a legally defined blockade? Where does this end? Is there a rule of law among humans, or is it merely the rule of the most powerful in the situation?

I think this was an amazingly stupid thing they did. It pretty much plays totally into Hamas hands. The war for public opinion in the world is being utterly lost by the Jews. The whole thrust of their current state is headed towards a terrible dissolution. So sad, too. What a bright shining star Israel used to be. And the palestinians, with their stupidly held statement that there could be no state of Israel, they were always the bad guys for most of the world. Now the situation has turned. If the palestinians were smart they would go all ghandi at this point and start starving themselves to death. That would be much more powerful than blowing themselves up.

Of course it is absolutely true that the Palestinian Authority is the enemy of Hamas, and it is true that the Egyptians don't like Hamas either. So Israel may have felt it had some cover for what it did on Monday. Unfortunately, the way it was done has given the victory completely over to Hamas. Just like the Gaza War did in the months before Obama became president.

See, Bibi Netanyahooooooooo, he thinks he is winning, because at home people are becoming ever more paranoid and rightwing. Unfortunately, we have to live in the greater world. The time is fast approaching when the USA is going to back seriously away from the Israelis. Israel has many nuclear weapons, so no one will ever take them down by force. But, psychologically, they are in a ruin now. Eventually they will become South Africa to the rest of the world and therein lies the ultimate extermination of the "jewish state". In fifty years there won't be one. And the rightwingers will have wrought this.

The danger, to all of us, in the meantime, is that Queen Esther (Sara Palin) may get elected to be president of the US. This would set up the confrontation and war that might lead to true nuclear disaster. Palin clearly believes her own hype and thinks that G-d, to use the jewish terminology, has chosen her to bring this about.

I think far more likely, there will be some exchanges of nuclear bombs between various states in the Middle East. I think both Jerusalem and Mecca will be destroyed in the next fifty years. Adieux ancient symbols of who is supposed to be G_d's people. I certainly am glad I am not one of those people. Look what you get for it? Hatred, enmity, fear, stupidity. You get the chance to be responsible for the death of millions. Sort of like those fascists in the third reich. And anyone who doesn't vote against Palin is exactly like those who ignored the rise of that nasty little austrian in Deustchland. You will bear the responsibility for all those who die at their hands.

So, you have that creep in Iran, and he'll have some bombs here pretty soon. And you have that creep in Israel. And then there's the creep in North Korea, trying to hang onto power by tightly controlling those sad people. And think of how bad things would be if McCain were the president now? Think how terrible everything would be.

The only thing worse, would be his assassination by some xtian fanatic "patriot", to give the reins of power to Sara Palin. Queen Esther.

Will this come to pass? You'd better hope not. With SP in the white house, in a few years they would stop calling it Pandora's Box and start calling it Palin's Box, because she will have loosed the most terrible woes upon the world. She might be the one to lead the species to its suicide.

Not the most optimistic of times. I wonder how stupid the Israelis can be? They have consistently lost every conflict they have been in since Bibi came to power. Oh, they win militarily. But what do they get out of it? The Vietnam War showed us that conflicts these days are just not about territory and power. They are about the will of all the people across the world. Good luck to us all.

And in the singing and the playing of human kind can be found the Lady's mercy. And in the violence and the hatred can be found Her tears, and Her impatience. Yes, I believe that the force that creates the universe and all within it can and is impatient with chosen stupidity.

I am a patriot. I am against committing suicide in the name of any given idea. I love the world and I am grateful to the Lady for the opportunity to be part of this beauty. How hard is it for my fellow humans to see this?

Rich Men, Never to Enter Heaven

2010-06-02T09:28:00.005-05:00

Image by P5ychoP3nguin via Flickr

How pissed are we all? Very, of course. British Petroleum is screwing the whole country, and the entire civilization, and the cowardly men who run the company are weaseling out of responsibility for any of it. When all is said and done, this catastrophe is specifically the work of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, the two worst traitors this country has ever produced.

They absconded their sacred responsibility to take care of this great land and instead spent their time being afraid of those losers in Afghanistan. Think how much worse the damage from the oil industry is going to be, compared to the damage from the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001?

Meanwhile the government reveals itself as essentially powerless and in thrall to the vested interests, to use an 18th century term. The rich men and the international corporations have overruled the democratic process here in the United States. Although we elected a strong, determined man, it is now shown that no matter his skills, the companies exercise veto power over the entire government.

We discover the agencies that should have protected us were actually in league with those they were supposed to oversee. And we know that this is true across the board. The government of the United States is essentially powerless when it comes to the rich corporations.

Where are we headed? Between this disconnect, and the fact that the revolutionary spirit is entirely held by people who think lowering taxes is going to make a difference, I should think things are going to get very hairy here in the body politic in the next ten years.

Meanwhile, the single interest folks, the anti-abortionists, the gay activists, the anti-tax people, play their pathetic little games. And these games only serve to suck the energy away from the real problem at the heart of things: Politicians are not concerned with the whole of the country anymore. They only give a crap about themselves, and keeping their access to the major league dollars that stand behind these groups and the corporations and also the labor unions.

I don't really see a way out of this. Recently an old friend of mine wrote me, speaking of the islamic world, and the subject of honor killings (specifically a young girl stoned to death) and said, how could we ever solve this problem, we are too far apart. Thinking about that, I come to realize, having read the comments section at Free Republic, that there is no way the bridge can be built between those rightwing republicans and myself. There is no longer any common ground. We are on opposite sides.

Where does this lead? It can't be good. Just like western culture and the third world medieval values of the middle east, there is no where for us to agree. So, is it then ultimately a struggle to see who wins?

If so, I see this country fragmenting, and in its fragmentation, I see not just the rise of the fascist state that is China, but also the rise of other fundamentalist, fascist groups, across the entire human world.

But it may not make a damned bit of difference. We may be actively pursuing a course that will kill off the human animal. This would, actually, be the best possible outcome for the rest of the natural world. In so many clear ways, this species that we are, has become a liability for the natural world.

So, is the moral choice a kind of unconscious suicide? Is that what is really going on? Gotta wonder.

Meanwhile, I am absolutely certain that in nature itself, the Lady's breath, lies the mercy that makes this existence an act of grace. Embrace Her.

No Shirt, No Shoes, No White Skin, No Service

2010-05-20T12:40:00.005-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

Here it is May in the good old USA. Arlen Spector lost on Tuesday and Rand Paul won. The commentary has been all over the map. I really don't have anything to add about Spector; he made his bed and now he's ready for a nap. But Rand Paul was witless enough to go on Rachel Maddow's show and be interviewed by somebody actually good at this game. I don't know who his advisors are, but somebody screwed up here.

Paul, a good libertarian, and the son of the Paul who ran for president in the Republican Party in 2008, managed to tell us that while he sort of supports the Civil Rights Act of 1965, there is a little something in there that he can't go for: He thinks that any business owner of any private company should be allowed to refuse service to anyone they choose, no matter for what reason.

That is to say, all those kids at the lunch counters in the South in the early 1960s? They were whistling up the wrong chimney and should never have been served. It was the business owners right to be as bigoted as he liked in as public a manner as he liked. That is, according to our boy Rand, free speech.

So there is a point in this, really. We all agree that people should be allowed to lead the lives they choose, even when they harbor very non PC feelings like racism, sexism, homophobia. It is that this is one of those areas, what is in the realm of what some call the government but which I point out is the public sphere. That places where we all are forced to get along with each other.

We aren't allowed to be bellicose in public after a certain point. We aren't allowed to attack and murder people we don't care for. We aren't allowed to throw other people out of restaurants because we don't want them there. We aren't allowed to deliberately provoke people. Or maybe we are. Go to any football game and there will always be a few people there with clothing that very deliberately insults the opposing team.

What I think about Rand Paul's opinion about this is that he is busy being a "pure" libertarian (although he is certainly not that, as any simple googling of his name will demonstrate). He is trying to say that something is always something: an owner can always do what he wants. But the fact is this, he wasn't around for those days. If you allowed business owners in the south to deny service to black folk, the Jim Crow era would still be around. The vast bigotry that still exists is a testament to this. If you allowed stores to discriminate on the basis of race, all the white folks in Mississippi would go to their stores and the black folk would go to the local WalMart. And that is the way it would be. This is why there had to be such oddities as school busing. Black folk were denied the opportunity to buy houses in certain neighborhoods. The South was deliberately kept an apartheid regime until Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

But make no mistake about it: the level of racism in the south is still intoleraby high. And the reason why it is this way is because those people,in their homes, teach their children to be racists. The american south will never get over the fact that they aren't actually superior to the black folk and that their entire economy was created by literally using the stolen labor of millions of human beings. When people wonder why these problems are still around I always think to myself there are hundreds of years of this to be deal with. You really think it will go away any time soon?

Thanks to the Lady for the chance to live in this interesting time. Love & mercy to you all.

Kill the Rich

2010-05-05T09:18:00.003-05:00

As they used to say in the 1970s. I've long felt that the Masters of the Universe version of american reality (borrowing from that literatist, Tommy Wolfe) was one of the most destructive possible realities we could be inhabiting. Guess what, I was right.

Paula B. Voos, Economist, Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations:
http://www.politico.com/arena/archive/efca.html (March 31st, 2009)

“Since 1989, 59 percent of all the income growth in the United States has accrued to the upper one percent of households and about 36 percent went to the upper one-tenth of that upper one percent."

Woah. I always thought that the "trickle-down theory" worked better than that...

It gets worse. Voos even argues that this vast wealth difference precipitated the recession.

"Productivity kept climbing, but not wages. Incomes stagnated for typical American families, many of whom were forced to go into excessive debt just to meet ordinary needs such as adequate housing in states where housing prices had soared. Some took on inappropriate subprime mortgages because low “teaser rates” were the only way they could afford monthly payments. Credit card debt mushroomed.

Simultaneously, there was an explosion of speculation as the “Greed is Good” generation put its ill-gotten gains into various investments, including many backed by this very debt – bonds securitized by shaky mortgages. And that, along with direct speculation in various new unregulated investment markets, created a bubble that inevitably burst, precipitating the current recession.”

Here on the hedonistic treadmill, grabbing at the brass ring. Fuck everyone but me, they say. Vote republican. That's what it is all about. Ask any tea partier, will you give up your government paid benefits, social security/medicare for the sake of your great grandchildren? And they'll say, why we earned that and deserve it and screw the rest of you.

Well, thanks to the Lady for Her mercy today. Knowing what I know I try for the wry grin, but so often the hollow sound of the hungry child fills the cavern of modern culture. May we find Her love this day. May we live in the actual truth, not the propaganda of Fox News and the NRO. May they come to accept their responsibility for what has happened.

Kent State Massacre, 40 Years On

2010-05-04T10:22:00.009-05:00

Image by cliff1066™ via Flickr

"Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming
We're finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio..." Neil Young, 1970

May 4th, 2010. Forty years ago I was working for the St. Louis Globe Democrat as Chief Copyboy. I cut the wire service copy and put it on the City Editor's desk. The teletype machines would spit this stuff out, multiple copies, or versions of the same story. That day of course, the story was the dead students at Kent State University. I cut that copy and took it with me at the end of my day, 3 PM. After work I went to the Quad at St. Louis University where the demonstration was already underway. I remember giving the wire copy to Jack Bellersen, who read it to the crowd. It was a really terrible, frightening moment.

Jeffrey Miller, Sandy Scheuer, William Schroeder, Allison Krause. Ninteeen and twenty year olds. Two of them part of the protest, two of them innocents walking by the scene. One of them in ROTC. The day before her death Allison Krause put a flower in a guardsman's rifle barrel. She was shot in the chest and died at the hospital. Jeff Miller was shot in the mouth. He clearly was targeted as a member of the protest group.

No one was ever held responsible for any of this. The Guard was let off, the Governor was let off, the President of the University was let off. Nobody ever paid for any of the damage. But it broke the back of "peace with honor" and the German Boy (Kissinger) did what he had to to end the War, more or less, by the fall of 1972 so that Tricky could get re-elected.

Well, I think of those people quite often. I remember the picture of Jeff Miller, lying dead with that girl above him crying out. I read today that there was an undercover student, Terry Norman, who had a gun and who is reported to have started the massacre by firing his pistol. He worked for the FBI. I have no trouble believing that. Somebody like that would love to have the opportunity to turn it all to horror. That's the psychology of those spy/soldier of fortune types. Like an arsonist, they want to see the house burning.

And our house is pretty close to burning now. People are packing heat to the demonstrations these days. Think about that: if the students at Kent State had been armed, as the National Rifle Association wants us to be. Would they have started shooting back? I rather imagine they would. And today, if a demonstration with the tea partiers gets out of line, will there be bloodshed? It could happen. For many of those people the civil war is not over.

And now, tell me, what did we buy in Vietnam? What did we get for those 50,000 dead americans and those 400,000 dead vietnamese? What was gained from spending those billions of dollars? Did the peninsula fall to the communists? You will find a lot of people today who think we lost because of the protesters. Seriously, that's a meme in the right wing. They reveal their ignorance of the conflict when they say that, but it is another example of re-writing the facts to fit your emotional need.

The commission set up by Nixon, the president, to look at Kent State said there was no justification for the violence. The distance between the people shot and the Guardsmen was at its closest 81 meters, 240 feet. Not exactly close enough to hurt anybody. And the fact that the Guardsmen turned and fired as a group, in unison, creates the possibility of the scenario where an order was given.

If I were one of the Guard I would come forward and tell the truth, because their time on this earth is getting short now and when they cross over they will be forced to face this, to face those four people who's lives they took, and the only thing that can expiate their guilt is to provide the truth to the whole world. And to those who believe there is no truth, let me say there is an audio recording of the event on which you can hear someone saying what may be an order to fire. It's too subjective a piece of evidence to say for sure, but something is not known about that day and the truth of it will be in front of everyone involved when they leave this lifetime and go into the next.

Let the Lady show us that being honest about these things is the true source of mercy in this universe. As always I am grateful for the Lady's love; it is with me all the time.

The Flag of Wishful Thinking

2010-04-21T12:14:00.006-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

Trolling the net. Been reading TN Coates at the Atlantic site lately. He's a black man and a great writer. Lately he's been ruminating on the civil war, and the romanticization of the confederacy you get among white southerners. Recently Virginia's Republica governor proclaimed the remember the noble boys in gray month and took quite a bit of shit for leaving out all mention of slavery and black folk, some of whom actually live in Virginia these days. The ones that they haven't pushed into Washington, D.C. to get rid of them.

Anyway, in the many words Coates quotes from various sources in the actual confederacy you come to understand that from their point of view that war was pretty much totally about white supremacy. They believed that god meant for them to be able to enslave black folk because black folk were little better than animals and certainly not like white human beings. Particularly frightening in this vision are Booth, the murderer of our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, and the guy who was the vice-president of the confederacy. His name, luckily, escapes me at this moment.

These men produced written documents that make it quite clear that the superiority of the white race is at the very heart of that war.

So, after Lincoln was killed, Johnson, one of the worst presidents we have ever had, allowed the confederate troops to be pardoned merely for laying down their weapons. Thus was born this industry based on a deliberate lie: We didn't really lose, we just ran out of resources. In all actuality, the CSA veterans said, we really should have won. Not unlike the republicans speaking about the loss of the house and senate and the presidency. We actually did win, if they just checked it.

Where this takes us is to sore loser territory. Just think about it: These folks were traitors to the constitution and to the united states of America. They did this to retain an unnatural advantage, to make money off the free labor of other men. They justified this by saying that God was on their side (and the Lady knows there is plenty of stuff in the old testament about having slaves). And they lost, mainly because black men stepped up and fought for the Union.

And now their descendants, having been fed this story of the noble cause, want to overlook the people in their populations who weren't descended from this clearly superior bunch. And they want to fly their flags, the stars and bars, to show they are "rebels", you know, free spirits. Real Americans. Not like those people who don't come from our specific northern european roots.

The Confederacy was a terrible idea. If it had won this world would have been wounded in a really specific and dishonest fashion. I think there is little doubt the conflict that would've come some decades after a southern win would have been far worse, and far sadder. And I'm talking about a war that did happen that cost a half a million american lives.

So, the Stars and Bars. You see them on people's cars and shirts and hats and I think to myself, there goes the flag of wishful thinking. Ah, if we could only re-write history and make ourselves the good guys that we know we are. The darkies liked slavery and were better off. The white folk were noble and honest and rarely actually beat the bejesus out of their stock, I mean their negro helpers. And the vast number of light skinned black folk, that's just cause the negress was naturally very sexual, like an animal, and needed some white men to service her occasionally.

I can tell you what I see when I see the stars and bars, I see "SORE LOSER" stamped across their foreheads. I see people who have so deceived themselves that they are in for a significant headsup when they cross over at the end of their physical life. When they finally tap into the truth it is going to hurt them in a way they have always been far too cowardly to face.

The Lady's mercy for them will be their opportunity to change themselves. Of course they will embrace it, but perhaps ego will once again grow cankers on their eyelids.

Myself, I hope to see honestly, though I know it is painful every day. I have seen too much of my own ego-driven lying in this life. It is important to acknowledge it and to keep moving. Life truly is for learning.

Sixties Memories: Magic Michael, Part 1

2010-04-13T14:06:00.004-05:00

When I first went away to college, in 1968, I lived in one of the three male dorms at St. Louis University. I had already spent most of my summer there, working for Lou Falkner, the University's registrar, at a job my sister Kathy had obtained for me.

I had tried to work for my sister Diane's husband, Tom Bubnar in his father's metal plating factory in Detroit, but I didn't much like it. In my family in those days you weren't really allowed to say "no" to things like that. It was such a good way of making some money. One of those things my mother engineered.

So the only way out of it was to turn in a psycho person and make everybody very unhappy. This was to become a modus operandi for me in my earlier years. I just basically worked myself up to losing control and then I damaged myself. My poor sister Diane didn't know what to do. And my brother-in-law already thought I was a dweeb. He was always a good republican and a not-very-good but still believing Catholic.

Anyway, my sister Kathy came and got me and took me to St. Louis and installed me in the dorm and got me a low level job, making about the same money, though that I was making in Detroit. People got paid shit in those days.

I lived in several different dorm rooms over that summer. Kathy came and went in her own life which I did not much share. I wrote a lot of letters and my brother Greg came by at one point and we drove home to Wichita in my sister Kathy's car, a Rambler she had purchased from the Owens', my father's little sister, Betty, and her husband, Harold. I used that car on and off that first year of college, but after that I didn't really see much of Kathy. I tried to be her friend, but she was always just a little too much surface for me. She often told me I had to suck up to people to do well in this world. I'm sure she meant it as good advice, and of course there is definitely truth to it, but at the time it was the sixties and I was pretty much not going to be a person who "sucks up" to anyone. Still, a problem for me. It's the idea of bending truth for an ego-driven purpose.

But that's me. When the fall came along and I started actually going to college, I ended up living in Walsh Hall, one of the two balls of the "Dick" as the men's dorm was generally known. They had built this fourteen story tower between two four story men's dorms, connecting all three. It's a catholic college, and here you have a tall tower with two similarly shaped smaller buildings to each side, and then the thing is named for the beer baron that ponied up the cash: Griesedicke. Yes, that would be "greasy dick". And it would sway in the wind. You could feel it up on the top floors. Standing tall and waving. Hmmm.

There was a dining room/cafetaria in the basement. I loved it because you could have as much food as you wanted. And I wanted as much food as I could get. My single biggest memory of my childhood is of being hungry. My mother lived through the Depression, so she was given to pinching the penny as tight as she could. Particularly, I did not get enough meat. I was always hungry for meat, for proteins. I'm not saying we were startving. I am just saying that she would load the carbs and give my dad the best and most of the meat. And he worked hard, and deserved it. But I was always hungry. So when I got to go to that dining room in the bottom of the Dick I loaded up my plate with five or ten pieces of fried chicken and four or five glasses of sweet iced tea and went to town.

One day in early October, a guy came up to my table and sat down with me. He had a beard and a massive grin and he immediately brought up Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein's magnum opus. This guy turned out to be Jack Raymond Jones. He was a freshman, like I was, but I thought he had to be at least a grad student. He was barrel chested and looked like an english king. His beard was red, and he was a black belt in Tai Kwan Do and he was constantly doing his hand exercises. Altogether a large presence. Jack attended SLU on a special scholarship from the Physics Department that came from a paper he had written in high school. I didn't understand it then, and I still don't understand it, but I have it in my basement files somewhere. I saw it two years ago.

Jack and I were in the Honors Program at SLU. And my friend, Chris Beckman, was also in the program. Looking back on it, I don't think much of what courses they offered us, but I'm sure they meant well. Most of the honors program kids were, by then, complete hippie freaks. Marijuana was making inroads everywhere you looked and we liked it. All of us. JJ liked booze, though, and we drank some fine liquors because of that. In particular Jack liked Courvoisier, the cognac. And he liked the expensive kind. It was good.

Jack had immediately gotten himself put on academic probation. This meant that he wasn't allowed out of his room until 9 p.m. every night. Effectively that meant that anybody who wanted to hang with Jack had to go to his dorm room and hangout. So, every night after dinner a small group congregated there and inevitably played all three of the Doors' albums that existed: The Doors, Strange Days, and Waiting for the Sun. And Jack would sing along, pretty much every word. Except for "Hello I Love You," which JJ thought was too cheesy for the Doors. Too pop.

After nine we would get up and go out of the dorm and walk around mid-town St. Louis, down by the Fox Theatre and Powell Concert Hall. We would go and try and find some food. I had small money at that point, but was still working for Falkner. Plus I got some money from my sister who was in grad school at SLU, working toward her masters degree in literature. She had been an RA in the women's dorm, Rogers Hall, but at this time she was doing something else. Though I don't remember what. Anyway, she funded me a little too. But my main source for money, besides what I was earning myself, came from Michael Zoeller.

Magic Michael was from Louisville, Kentucky. He was the only child of a couple that ran a company that marketed first day covers of stamps for collectors. Michael still does this to this day, though times have been hard these last few years, I hear. Michael was unusual in this group of would-be freaks because he was enrolled not in the humanities, but in the college of Commerce and Finance. Still, he was far from a classic capitalist. And although he did have some money he was very generous with all of us. I look back on that now and realize how remarkable this was.

I always thought if I ever had any money I would try and pay Michael back. But of course I have never had anything like a normal financial reality. In my life I have not done very well, bucks-wise. Way it is, you know?

For many years in the early 70s, post college days, I remember going to Michael's home in Louisville, for Derby Day, the first Saturday in May. I think I went to the actual race twice, then after that stayed at MZ's and played bridge and drank mint juleps. I remember dancing my ass off in his living room at 4 a.m. one time and thinking this song has gone on for-fucking-ever, and finding out later it was a tape of a grateful dead show and they played a forty minute version of "Casey Jones" (Riding that Train/high on cocaine/Casey Jones you'd better/watch your speed.)

I remember taking acid there the first year of Derby. Was it the hundreth? Michael had an apartment, and Jacob David Felt was there, JD. MZ had obtained like 50 hits of purple micro-dot lsd and they had them in the freezer. He and Jacob kept egging each other on, "Let's get really weird!" and they'd take another hit. They must've had four or five hits apiece. I had one, and Pat Smith, who I was with, had one, and we all had a pretty wild time. We went to bed. When I got up in the morning and walked through the living room, Jacob was sitting on the couch, his hair a red-blonde jewish afro, his shirt unbuttoned. And I said, "Did you get weird?" And he said, "Nah, we got drunk." They had poured a bottle of vodka into one of those decorative brandy snifters that you really use to float flowers or candles in, and then they had poured some brandy into that and called it "the world's biggest martini", and they drank it all. Of course alcohol overcomes lysergic acid diethylamide. Whoops.

But we were all doing hallucinogens in those days. And not exactly for kicks, as Paul Revere and the Raiders would say. Those drugs at that time were a lot more about different ways to see. We believed in all that Doors of Perception stuff (Aldous Huxley, not to mention the Doors). There's a book, Be Not Content (William Craddock, avaible used for about $150 a copy), about this freak in California in the early mid-60s, before acid became a cultural trip, taking drugs and striving to break on through to enlightenment. And he is quite serious. That is certainly what a lot of that was about. Now people today, they look back on those days and they make fun of all that stuff, but it was about "longing", and it came from the need for a true religion. We knew, by then, that the religion of our youth, roman catholicism, was a phony joke, though John the 23rd, pope, had tried to reform the church. You could see the rot, even then. What is happening today is like what actually happened to the soviet communists. The rot from within.

So getting high was an attempt to have a spiritual experience. But one that was fun and interesting.

More tomorrow.

Jesus Re-Draws the Map & Other Cartoons

2010-04-07T10:36:00.003-05:00

Well, the feds busted a group of "xtian militia" people last week. Apparently they were planning to call 911, get a cop there and then kill him. And then, it goes, they were going to do some serious car bombing at the cop's funeral, to get a bunch of other cops d-e-a-d. Because, you ask, because the police are the foot soldiers of the international one world government movement that is seeking to enslave us all and take our money and our freedom. Seriously. They really were trying to do this. And a la Charlie (Chuckles) Manson, they thought that this action would provoke a serious and actual civil war in these United States. They thought that people (the militias mainly) would take up arms against the government and resist the incredibly well trained and heavily equipped United States Army.

Okay. This is where the rubber meets the road, fantasy-wise. These people, who look like a bunch of white trash backwoodsie folks who ought to be working on their meth lab, are seriously incapable of getting anything going on. But they had decided to go ahead and do some things that would have gotten an innocent bystander/victim killed. So the Feds, who had an undercover person actually infiltrated in the group, went ahead and took these folks down. And they were indicted by a grand jury. Last I heard they were consigned to their jail cells, denied bail on account of how nuts they obviously are.

And my favorite part of this story is their organizational principal, their "mission statement" if you will: They are xtians with guns who are here to help Jesus fight the last battle with the anti-xst and whoever else He may designate as the "enemy". In this case, obviously the Federal Government of this country, one of the few countries in the world actually run by a government elected by its own citizenry. Thus, for these folks, the Hutaree (means, xtian soldier according to them), Jesus apparently hates the electorate of this country enough to start blasting them out of the water. This will come as something of a shock to all those catholic hispanics who voted for Barack Obama with the idea that he stood for social justice.

Not that social justice is in the minds of the Hutaree. No. They have greater weirder games to play. It came out yesterday that, according to an ex-fiance of one of the arrested, they had a big map on the wall of one of their houses. It was a map of the United States. They had redrawn boundaries and divvied up the states among the bunch of them, giving areas new names, based on their family names, and re-naming cities and towns.

My favorite response to this bit of information was the comment that said, if these guys had just discovered Dungeons and Dragons when they were young, all this might've been avoided.

So true. On some basic level, most of the Tea Party crowd are operating in the land of 12 year-olds' fantasies. What they want doesn't exist, never existed, and can't exist. What Rush Limbaugh has really wrought is an empowering of the spoiled little kid in the electorate. That kid who had to have it his way and when he didn't get his way he went home to brood. These are the people who listen to talk radio and who go to tea party rallies. And the dangerous part is that they think it is even possible to have things the way they want them. Not going to happen.

But, it's a fun idea: get out the map and re-make America the "right" way. I wonder where they were planning to put the black and brown folk? Didn't Hitler have some ideas about that?

May the Lady honor us with Her favor today.

Easter Sunday in the Pedophiles Church

2010-04-04T16:00:00.001-05:00

Easter Sunday: The Church doubles down on Ratzinger. Man, I love that. Deny Deny Deny, please. Nothing, but nothing, shows the emptiness of this religion more than the fact that these "men" can characterize all the noise as "gossip." How crazy stupid must these men be?! I am digging it. How stupid can these men be?

What it demonstrates is how occluded the Church hierarchy is. They honestly cannot see how they have lied and dissembled into this situation. Is there any need for any more proof that they have no grip on the truth at all? Why would you believe anything these men tell you?

So, I say to Ratzinger, keep it up you snide little shit. You have a real surprise waiting for you on the other side, as did Karol Wotyla when he passed over. The ability to lie to yourself is truly a hallmark of those who seek "power" over the rest of us. And they pay the most when they are called to account.

Thanks to the Lady for the a world that is characterized entirely by Truth. Knowing that is real mercy. Take heart, People. This really can set you free.

Divining the Bear, or Baring the Divine's Vine

2010-03-30T10:46:00.002-05:00

Well, I got a comment to this blog that I dumped because it was irrational and hating. The guy was all upset because I use the nom de blog, AsBjorn, and he didn't feel I was worthy of the old Norse name. However, difference between us, his translation of As Bjorn wasn't "Divine Bear", but, rather, "God Bear." Which I somehow think demonstrates a differing of directions here.

There is no doubt that my surname, Osburn, actually does come from the Danelaw occupation of northern England in the 800s. Thus, actually a Danish name in its earlier form. What As means is easily demonstrated, in the term "As Gard", "heaven" (western european), or "Valhalla", the place where the great hall (val halla) for the warrior kings, exists, in terms of actual real estate. So, "As" means "of the heaven(s)". Now, bring on the Shield Maidens, warbling Wagner.

I have no desire to live as any kind of god, any version or definition that is common and known to the human species. I got the feeling from this comment that the guy sees "god" as a powerful super hero type figure that can change the nature of reality at his whim.

Hard to see how any version of any god would want to do that, having gone to the trouble to create an ordered state of reality in the first place. But humans have been desiring the ability to avoid the rules since time immemorial (or five thousand years if you are nutso Book-based believer).

So, I'm just referring to my genetic heritage when I use this term, Divine Bear. I'm not what the common culture calls a "bear" these days. That usage has been taken over by furry gay men. I'm not that furry and I'm not actually gay, though there are a few people who might insist that my taste in musical theatre would say differently.

Nope. I'm just a midwesterner, Kansas boy, with a mild interest in the northern european cultures before they were changed by the xtians.

I remember going to York, in the United Kingdom (the part that is actually old England) with my wife on our honeymoon in 1999. Walking through the city gate I was struck by the most vivid sense of deja vu I have ever had. I wasn't really aware of the Danelaw at that point, but research showed me the way to track the roots of the name. I had known before that that the language root of Osburn was old norse. Here was the geographic route that my ancestors had taken to bring the name to England.

I've also always felt that there was a reference to Canis Major in the name, the Great She Bear in the heavens. She who points to the Polaris. That part is much more romanticised. But one thing I know about the nature of reality is that as long as you are truthful about what it means to you you are allowed to define it for yourself. Ha.

And its not like I'm interested in anyone else feeling the same way. The web is thick with alternate versions of reality. Read any rightwing blog and you will have left the phenomenol world behind. There's a sense of the vastness of the human mind, ripping through the various blogs, forums, and chat rooms that now exist. It is a jolly time that we are in. We haven't quite accepted that there are literally billions of differing versions of reality just yet.

For democracy to flourish, there has to be a certain level of tolerance. When the web community is tolerant it can be helpful. When it is intolerant, like this guy, it becomes just another place to whine about one's own ego and its desperate needs.

Like it or not, humans are a social species. It is necessary to have a number of humans to have a successful life cycle. Forcing them all to believe/act the same way ultimately dooms any group. This is the real truth of evolution. Things change. Diversity is actually healthy in a biological sense.

Well, enough cavilling here. Nobody reads this blog, almost nobody at all, so this is pretty much entirely for my own amusement. I do thank the Lady Arianrhod. I do my best to amuse My Lady and to keep my own tolerance level up as high as I can keep it.

Obama Changes Everything, Again

2010-03-24T09:39:00.003-05:00

I admit it, I had sort of given up several times in the last year, watching the Health Care debate. The Republicans were obviously batshit crazy. They had also decided to double down on their base strategy. And it took the democrats quite awhile to just leave the republicans in the dust and go it alone.

But, in the end I think Obama thought this had to come to pass, and in Nancy Pelosi he had the right partner in the House to get the Senate bill approved as it stood. Now I think there will be many adjustments in the next ten years. And I think some things will work and other things won't work. I don't think this law is liberal enough, but it exists and it won't be going away any time soon. The country will have to deal with it. And that's the part that screws the Republicans. Most people are going to like some parts of this bill, yet the Repub base is already demanding the whole thing be repealed.

That's an untenable strategy for the fall elections. People want huge parts of this law to exist. It's going to be an interesting mid-term election for once.

And to those who doubted Barack Obama: Can you now see this is an extraordinary man. The man with the skill set to change everything, but not in a radical fashion. He will change this country in a way that is designed to help us all. That is really what pisses off the republicans. They are, at heart, Tories in the sense that they really do think there are some people better than others. For instance, Republicans really don't believe one man one vote was a good idea. It allowed all those less than human humans to vote. Most of them (the repubs) still believe that black folk should only get 2/5's of a vote, like in the old days. And that women should really not be allowed to vote at all.

Luckily, we live in a constitutionally governed country, and nobody can take us back to those days. And because we live in such a country, we get to have a president that frankly most other countries in the world would love to have in charge. If there was a vote for president of everybody on earth, this guy would carry it home, no problem.

And there is more to come. Lots more. Change we can believe in. Maybe not as radical a change as you and I think should come to pass, but change, incrementally, towards a better world for everybody. For everybody. How's them apples?

So, now the nation is seeing it happen again. The slow steady march to the way it needs to be. Hillary saw it, and John McCain saw it, and now the republican congress has seen it. The only question is this: If you love this country why don't you join in? There have been several blog posts these last couple of days by thoughtful conservatives on how it could be a better law and how conservative ideas can help. And I totally agree with them. It would be so much better for america, for everybody, if the republicans could join in and learn how to compromise and then we really would be getting somewhere.

But the man is right who said there weren't any middle of the road repubs left. Maybe those ladies from Maine. But even they are a little batshit crazy. Well, if there is to be a two party system here, there have to be two parties that are both capable of rational discourse.

Well. Thanks to the Lady for the mercy that is Barack Obama. I know She doesn't provide leaders, but I do think She casts the great dice of possibility for us. And I give Obama himself the credit for seeing what needs to be done and for doing it. May we all follow his example.

Notes on the Political History of Jerusalem

2010-03-24T09:31:00.005-05:00

It has been a good week for western democracy, with the exception of Israel. Still bent on its own self-destruction, Netanyahu and company have continued in their efforts to establish some sort of Jewish empire in the Levant.

Bibi (Netanyahu) said, talking to AIPAC (the rightwing pro-Israel lobbying group) that the Jews had every right to Jerusalem because they founded it and built it and it should ought to be theirs. Yeah.

So here's a long cut from Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog, that speaks to some of the historical information about Jerusalem and its history. Good stuff, informed by science (archaeology) and by history:

COLE:
Jerusalem was founded in honor of the ancient god Shalem. It does not mean City of Peace but rather 'built-up place of Shalem."

The "Jewish people" were not building Jerusalem 3000 years ago, i.e. 1000 BCE. First of all, it is not clear when exactly Judaism as a religion centered on the worship of the one God took firm form. It appears to have been a late development since no evidence of worship of anything but ordinary Canaanite deities has been found in archeological sites through 1000 BCE. There was no invasion of geographical Palestine from Egypt by former slaves in the 1200s BCE. The pyramids had been built much earlier and had not used slave labor. The chronicle of the events of the reign of Ramses II on the wall in Luxor does not know about any major slave revolts or flights by same into the Sinai peninsula. Egyptian sources never heard of Moses or the 12 plagues & etc. Jews and Judaism emerged from a certain social class of Canaanites over a period of centuries inside Palestine.

Jerusalem not only was not being built by the likely then non-existent "Jewish people" in 1000 BCE, but Jerusalem probably was not even inhabited at that point in history. Jerusalem appears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates for the united kingdom under David and Solomon. So Jerusalem was not 'the city of David,' since there was no city when he is said to have lived. No sign of magnificent palaces or great states has been found in the archeology of this period, and the Assyrian tablets, which recorded even minor events throughout the Middle East, such as the actions of Arab queens, don't know about any great kingdom of David and Solomon in geographical Palestine.

Since archeology does not show the existence of a Jewish kingdom or kingdoms in the so-called First Temple Period, it is not clear when exactly the Jewish people would have ruled Jerusalem except for the Hasmonean Kingdom. The Assyrians conquered Jerusalem in 722. The Babylonians took it in 597 and ruled it until they were themselves conquered in 539 BCE by the Achaemenids of ancient Iran, who ruled Jerusalem until Alexander the Great took the Levant in the 330s BCE. Alexander's descendants, the Ptolemies ruled Jerusalem until 198 when Alexander's other descendants, the Seleucids, took the city. With the Maccabean Revolt in 168 BCE, the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom did rule Jerusalem until 37 BCE, though Antigonus II Mattathias, the last Hasmonean, only took over Jerusalem with the help of the Parthian dynasty in 40 BCE. Herod ruled 37 BCE until the Romans conquered what they called Palestine in 6 CE (CE= 'Common Era' or what Christians call AD). The Romans and then the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium ruled Jerusalem from 6 CE until 614 CE when the Iranian Sasanian Empire Conquered it, ruling until 629 CE when the Byzantines took it back.

The Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 638 and ruled it until 1099 when the Crusaders conquered it. The Crusaders killed or expelled Jews and Muslims from the city. The Muslims under Saladin took it back in 1187 CE and allowed Jews to return, and Muslims ruled it until the end of World War I, or altogether for about 1192 years.

Tim's summary: People that desire power will tell any lie and twist any truth to achieve what it is they think they want. History is a record of humans torturing the truth for reasons of their own egos.

The Pope Protects the Hierarchy, Never Mind the Children

2010-03-17T12:19:00.008-05:00

Let's face it, this current Pope is a bad little man, playing games with peoples lives. The scandal not only doesn't go away, it grows daily, across the world. And the response of the is purely rightwing game plan: they say its all a plot by the "anti-catholics" to cast doubt upon the church. Seems they've learned a thing or two from the israelis who know that all you have to doubt to respond to the charges of your bad deeds is to label those who would dare criticism "anti-semites". Because we are all too scared of our prejudiced pasts to actually admit that the the roman church and the state of israeli are run by scum bags who play politics with the actual facts of childrens lives because, well you know, they can.

So Pope Benedict and caused them to stay in the ministry, some to this very day. Of course, when he was a nazi youth he didn't know anything about the hoocaust. Some things just seem to pass over Ratzinger's head.

In a truly well constructed institution, those that allowed error to persist would hand in their resignations. But Cardinal Brady, the head of the irish church, said he would only resign if the pope required it of him. After all, his career is way more important than the children that were abused and forced to sign letters affirming the innocence of their abuser, in front of Brady himself twenty years ago.

Man, how do these assholes live with themselves? What it tells me is that they don't really believe their own religion. If they did, how could they not understand that as soon as they die these lies will become what they did in their lifetimes and they will have to accept all responsibility and experience all the pain and sadness their words and decisions have created in this world. But, they don't believe anything is going to happen to them, do they? That's how they can go along, convincing themselves that what they did was perfectly justified and they were only looking out for the "greater good of the church". What crap.

This takes us back to the days when Popes thought they could tell people what to do with their lives and just excommunicate them if they didn't like it. He's an intellectual, a lawyer if you will, examining the words and twisting them to support his conclusions, his desires for the kind of world he thinks god wants. What he reveals is that he has no clue whatsoever what the deity wants. Boy is he in for a big surprise when he cashes his chips.

Well, I have had to live with the reality of child sexual far too much in my life. And I have made my own errors in this world and have sought to make amends. My second wife was terribly abused by her father and her grandfather in the 1960s. I know far too much about this subject. I was involved with at least two women who were victims of abuse. I knew back in the day, catholic school, that there were some priests one avoided. And I knew also that the priesthood in those days had many gay men in it. In those days it was a way to avoid marrying and leading a life that was a lie. Thank the Lady gay men don't have to hide in the priesthood now. And clearly the pedophiles hid there as well.

Well, the roman church can turn this all around. Simply stop talking about a conspiracy to get the church, and start opening up everything to the world. Remove the veil of secrecy and quit protecting anybody who made these mistakes of conduct. Pedos don't get better. They should be removed from the priesthood immediately. And nun pedos should be removed, also, for there are some of them, also.

Thanks to the Lady for Her mercy, and Her love. Dark as this world is, Her love is our hope.

Israel's Orgy of Self Destruction:Masada Reborn

2010-03-11T11:59:00.004-06:00

Probably the worst thing that has happened this year, in terms of the future of modern civilization, is the way that Israel has chosen to commemorate certain sites that are shared with Islam as holy not to be touched historical shrines of the new Israel.

This means that the fundies have gotten clear control of the Israeli government. And now they will attempt to take all the land that they believe is theirs via JHVH. And then they will institute a form of "democracy" wherein arabs and other palestinians are not allowed to be full citizens. Sort of like the 3/5s that black folk counted for in early USA days.

Anyway, apartheid is not a strong enough word for what will happen in Israel. And this will breed even greater antipathy to the western world among the arabs and the persians. Why should they want to emulate us when clearly democracy is just a slogan, just a word that is tossed around by people like Netanyahu. There is no justice in this world, and thus there will be no peace.

Eventually somebody will do something extreme in Israel. There will be terrible things happening. Jerusalem will be destroyed. And then a kind of stupid armageddon will take place. The bad part of this is the western, civilized world is and will be utterly dependent on oil for the rest of my life and my childrens lives. So this conflict, which has simmered on and off for the last sixty years, when it boils over, it will destroy this civilization.

So I say, build more nuclear plants and do it now. And quit supporting Israel. They are bent on the destruction of themselves and everything around them. Let them commit suicide, if they like, but do not enable them with guns and money.

I wouldn't be surprised if the right wing israelis that run things are really the leftover pieces of the third reich, come back to life and determined to finish the job. That is certainly how they are playing it. Self destruction, what a lovely finish. An entire country as Masada.

But don't you feel bad about the children? Not to mention the vast quantity of arabs that are going to die along with the israelis. What gets me is that the people who lived in Palestine are and have always been the descendants of the jews that lived there thousands of years ago. Some jews left after Rome destroyed the kingdom in the first century, but most stayed and reproduced as humans do everywhere. And they changed over the centuries, giving up and changing their religion from standard judaism to xtianty to islam. They are the same people, except that they didn't go to europe and get tortured by the Inquisition and gassed by the nazis.

Mark my words here, this is the beginning of the end. When they write the history books, in their fortresses in europe in fifty years, they will note that this was the point at which the match was struck.

We are in an orgy of self destruction these days. Resist this, if you can.

Neurological Damage Control

2010-03-11T11:41:00.003-06:00

Here it is, mid March 2010. I keep looking up and realizing I've lived in this burg (Urbana) for going on nine years now. We had hoped to only spend a few years here, but then things happened. In any case, nine years along on this particular bend of the river. I have to admit, though, that the blog has turned out to be a very decent diary/journal, up until Randy Britton made me de-personalize it for the sake of his paranoia. Well, he's a paranoid person, very Navy. Good for him. As if anybody out there is interested in his life, much less mine.

When I do get people surfing through it is primarily either a subject that brings them, or it is a specific figure from my complex past. Thus, no one is likely to come looking for this particular post, unless I drop a significant subject or name into it.

Someone recently surfed through looking for Lucia Getsi, a person I know very little of but whom my ex-wife, Becky #2, positively hated when she lived in Bloomington-Normal. I guess Getsi must've been on staff at ISU there. I knew her primarily through her poetry. She had made a reputation, having written a book of poems about dealing with her daughter's disease. I forget what it was, but it was something profound and dramatic. As I recall, from hearing her read once, the poetry was pretty good. It is, of course, the politics that tell the real tale here. I believe Getsi was one of the people who panned the Writers BarBQ in the lit community.

So far as I know, though, everybody panned it in the writers community. It was just not too ultra cool for them. We published all over the map, sci fi, fantasy, realism, gay people's lives. Boy, you name it, we thought if it was a human experience it ought to be in the mag. But the Illinois Arts Council thought we sucked. We didn't publish enough Illinois writers. Then we published them but not the right ones. Then we published them but not their significant work. Get the drift? I always thought it was that guy who ran TriQuarterly in the old days, Gibbons?? He had a budget of a half a million dollars a year (Chicago University). We had a budget of a couple of thousand. Yet, we were considered the offensive group that he needed to keep out of the grant machinery.

That was another experiment of Tim's life that was flushed down the drain by those who think they are smarter and better than me. And I let them, too. Because after all is said and done, I just don't play well with the other children. I don't compete and I don't much like people who do compete. My brother Greg ruined competition for me before I was in my teens. And let's face it, when an art becomes a bureacracy, then the people who run it aren't the artists anymore, they are the people for whom power is the reason to be. And that is certainly true in the Illinois Arts Council. And for most of the socalled heavy heads I knew in Illinois letters over the years.

For every Jim McGowan, there was a Larry Lieberman. For every Dave Etter, there was a Dan Guillory. For every Gwendolyn Brooks there was a John Knoepfle. Eek. The good work was so often subsumed by the merely competent but well connected people. And you had to be nice to them and kiss their anuses and pretend like they had something going on or they wouldn't give you shit. And even then they wouldn't give me shit.

So I read my poems every day and I send a few out, here and there. No one seems to actually read them. I never get a comment. I can ask a couple of my friends to read things and comment, and they do. A line or two. But even my closest friends often choose to just ignore my work. The reason for my life.

I have tried to keep my integrity in this art, in these words. As far as I know I have. If this means I have consigned myself to the basement, that is too bad for the species as a whole. Because it means there are others like me, lost and never given the attention they deserve. Who knows what great art and science is out there, in boxes in the garage?

When I die I suppose all this will dissipate. What's the word? Attenuate. Indeed as all lives must eventually become thinner and thinner and then disappear into the ether. Who do we remember from five thousand years ago? Mainly kings and other killers, and the ideas of the gods. And in ten thousand more years will any of this have any kind of substance?

Thanks to the Lady Arianrhod, for this time and for this space.

Grouchy Bear Gives Up Dark Thoughts for Lent

2010-03-08T12:18:00.005-06:00

The days spin, worthless collections of capitalist remorse. I see that over the weekend Sarah Palin admitted that her family had crossed the border many times to take advantage of Canadian health care. A system she purports to despise now, with its "death panels" and its managed care. What does she think we have now?

We have death panels. They are run by the insurance companies. We have managed care. We manage to deny care to those who can't pay for it. How much more managed can you get?

The republicans have demonized this issue and the middle of the road democrats have pussyfooted around way too long. If this doesn't happen now then all bets are off. If it does happen, things will turn on a dime. I am, as always, pretty much a pessimist.

Post oscar notes: It was still a boring show. I see a war movie won the big awards. They threw a couple of bones to "Precious". Avatar made billions, but it really wasn't a great movie, as I understand it. Does it matter? The entire and whole problem with Hollywood is that it is, indeed, entirely about money. So it becomes more forgettable every year. This is our literature. These are our stories. Do you remember any of them?

Post Olympic notes: I really hated that punk speed skater that won all the medals. He impressed me as being entirely a shitty little snot who would do anything to anyone for the sake of his own puerile ego. I was glad to see him disqualified in that race near the end, and pretty much the medals I did see him win were mainly by other peoples' errors. That is the problem with sports today; movies are about money, sports are about winning at any cost. When the right talks about our loss of morality, they are always talking about sex and sexuality.

When I talk about our loss of morality, I am talking about the pre-eminence of ego as the basis for everything. Blame Ayn Rand, that nasty, psycho-sexual fucked up woman for codifying the desire to have it only my way. Here's my entire response to her and to all you people who think she's the shits:

"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it.

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day," - David Foster Wallace.

Now that is wisdom. That's a human that will be missed.

Thanks to the Lady for this world and this time. Perhaps I will be an optimist this year. That's what I will give up for lent: pessimism.

Tolerance and Tea

2010-02-17T09:34:00.006-06:00

What can I say today that makes any difference? Almost nothing can cause us to rise in this climate. Today I see the acidization of the world's oceans is progressing much faster than the similar rise that led to the great extinctions of 55 million years ago. Clearly we are bent on the destruction of the planet. There's a theory that intelligent life exists only until it has gotten to the stage that it can commit suicide and that we are almost there. And that very well could be.

Also, I believe there is a desire in the self for that apocalyptic moment when it all makes sense, though we are certainly doomed in that moment. As creatures we are torn between the desire to stay alive and the desire to end brilliantly. Reproduction forces us into many bad choices along the way, and then we blame our children and our parents for all that seems wrong in this (and every other) time.

It is now perfectly clear that the major power brokers on the Republican side are certainly evil and solely about their own personal fortunes and their own power. Nothing else matters and there is no desire on their part for any kind of actual discourse or discussion. As for the democrats, the public perception and the actual fact is that they are weak, vacillating between what they know to be true and what they think they should honor in terms of the wide range of public opinion on issues.

Hard not to believe we are headed directly for civil war. There are many in the tea party ranks who actively court this concept. I urge liberals, democrats, city dwellers, to arm yourselves and prepare for the time when sides must be taken. The collapse of the middle class pretty much dictates violent warfare. It amazes me that the rich cannot understand the central role they play in this drama.

If Marx was right about anything (and he wasn't right about that much), it is that the rich classes create the situation that causes unrest. As long as the middle class was doing what it perceived to be as okay, it had cable television and fast food and the kids could go to junior college. Now that it has become apparent that most of the wealth of this country has been stolen by the top five percent, it will become more and more possible to raise that revolutionary banner.

Of course the difference between the sixties and now is that the revolutionaries are desperate to be xtians, also. And they will use the banner of their version of xtianity to provoke the rest of us. Those of us who know the constitution is a secular document will be very defensive. I strongly suggest moving to Canada or New England if it is possible. Illinois is not a good place to be when this comes down. The number of rightwings who are armed and capable of murder is actually quite high.

Is patience really a virtue? I don't know. I've spent a great deal of my life working on patience, but I think I may have gone too far. I have been so patient that I have allowed myself to be screwed over, time and again. I think it is our patience, as liberals, as americans, that have allowed these movements to fester and arise in their clear fear of the black president. And I think it is Obama's patience that is his central problem. He is too cool now. Where will his coolness take us?

Most middle of the road americans wanted to go back to how things used to be, before the Republicans went crazy and turned it into all war all the time. The fact is however that that is not going to happen. The Washington Post is never going to bring down the powerful again. It is owned outright by the powerful. The democrats are never going to be the party of Roosevelt and the Republicans are never going to be the party of Reagan. That has passed. The time for division has at last come.

May the founders forgive us from wherever they are these days. It was a good idea, but democracy really can only work when there is that magic virtue: Tolerance.

And the tea partiers are definitely not tolerant. And Roger Ailes is not tolerant. And Glenn Beck is not tolerant.

May the Lady help us to find Her mercy in this twisted puzzle of our time.

The Times They Are A'Changin'

2010-02-11T10:02:00.007-06:00

Memories from the Sixties:

John Albert Bellersen. When I was a lowly freshman at St. Louis University I was in the Honors program. There on a National Merit scholarship, I suppose I was meant to be one of the smarties. It was a small program, but I met a lot of fun people. One of them, older than most of my friends was Jack Bellersen. I believe Jack was a junior the year we met him, and then was in his last year in what was my second year at SLU.

I ended up dropping out that second year, in the beginning of the second semester. I couldn't afford it, having lost my scholarship to really bad grades. Also I had knocked up Becky McGovern. We had had a lot of sex with absolutely no birth control. Hey, we were stupid catholic kids and we really didn't know what we were doing. Becky at that time had no thought of abortion and talked about going back to Europe, where her folks were living in Brussels, and having the child at a convent or something. Naturally, being a good catholic boy, I was never going to let that happen. So we got married in February, in a hot hurry, 1970.

But, back to Jack. My strongest memory of JB, as we called him, was of his grin. At the time we called it a "shit-eating" grin, because we were all doing a lot of marijuana. But, really, it had nothing to do with drugs. He just had a nice, wide smile with lots of teeth, and it felt quite genuine. Never forced. He just really enjoyed things.

I first got to know Jack during freshman year when he had a party at the apartment he was living at. He invited most of the honors program kids and I remember trooping down Laclede with Rita Collinge (I think) to go to this party. I was walking with Rita because my roommate second semester, David Imhoff, had invited several girls to this party. That was Imhoff, always the lady's man. I used to tell girls, standing next to David, "He's handsome, but I'm deep." That really pissed him off.

Anyway that party was sort of a watershed moment for me. It was crowded and raucous and everybody was smoking pot and drinking beer. Jack was playing Dylan's Highway 61 album and he put on "Like a Rolling Stone" and very nearly everyone in the room sang along, every word, verse and chorus, like it was our song. I was like, these are my people!

Later at that party I started making out a little with Rita when Monica Schaeffer walked in, late. She was supposed to be meeting me there, as my date. Since she saw me with Rita she ended up hanging out with Chris Beckman, who she was with for the next three years. Too bad. She was a beautiful irish girl, with long wonderful hair and smart as the dickens. I would've been far better off with her than with Becky McGovern. But that is the past.

Also at that party there was this guy, his name escapes me now, who was smoking an unfiltered camel and he was so stoned it had burned all the way down to his lip. He just sat there, on the floor, gone daddy. This guy once also painted a copy of Van Gogh's Starry Night that circulated among the people I knew at the time.

JB. JB had a big yen for a beautiful girl from Decatur, Martha Marie Alsup, who I had sort of dated briefly at the beginning of freshman year. She dropped me after about a week, but we remained okay friends. I had met her through my sister, who took me to Decatur that previous summer to meet her. My sister was an RA at Rogers Hall the women's dorm at SLU. This was my crazy sister Kathy who got her phd in literature at SLU. Back in those days we were still friends; she hadn't turned into the crazy maiden aunt type that she is now.

Martha and Jack had a stormy relationship for awhile. We had this sort of party apartment that we all kicked in to rent, $17/week, over on Laclede (3756 1/2 LaClede, Apartment #4) the spring and summer of 69. There were numerous parties there. I mainly remember Steppenwolf's Born to Be Wild, and Dylan's Lay Lady Lay from that time. We smoked a lot of dope and I was moody and withdrawn, having broken up with Katy Wilson in the late winter. Jack Jones and Chris Beckman, my two good friends, told me to pick either Nora Metzger or Monica Schaeffer and start love anew. Ironically enough they each ended up with one of those women. As far as I know Jones is probably still with Nora.

JB was sort of a campus leader at SLU. In the spring of 1970, the May Day demonstrations, after Nixon and company invaded Cambodia, were enormous. More than 700 college campuses were on strike that weekend. This was the weekend in May that the students were murdered in Ohio at Kent State. Also students were murdered in the south, Jackson, Mississippi, at Jackson State. I remember going to the demonstration at the quad at St. Louis University. I worked for the St. Louis Globe Democrat at the time, as chief copyboy. I cut the wire service copy. I had cut some of the stories about Kent State and brought them to the demonstration. JB was speaking at that demonstration and I shoved the wire service copy at him and he read it to the crowd. I remember the people picking him up on their shoulders and he was shouting to the crowd about the Man murdering our brothers in Ohio. It was an intense experience. The emotion in the crowd was overwhelming.

Later that weekend people I knew were involved in the demonstrations at Washington University where the ROTC building was burnt to the ground. At least one person I knew, Steven Carter, spoke about throwing rocks at the police. There for awhile it did look like the revolution was at hand. I feel bad for the police, looking back, but after the national guard firing on people at Kent State you can understand how the average college student was feeling at the time. It came perilously close to a failed revolution. If the students had taken up arms there would have been terrible bloodshed. We were lucky. Lucky that things didn't go any further. Lucky that Bill Ayers and his people were unable to arouse a real violent revolution.

Jack Bellersen, and me, and most of the people we knew, were not after an "armed struggle" for a socialist reality. Most of us didn't think socialism would really work. We all knew that the Soviet Union was a terrible place. The stories about Stalin and the Gulag had us all very wary. But we also knew that what passed for democracy in, say Alabama, when we were growing up, was a sham that kept the black folk from voting. A reform was needed, but a peaceful reform was what people really wanted. Did we get it? To some extent.

The sixties did change things radically. But luckily for the united states, the forces that wanted to use violence were restrained. We can only hope that happens again, with the tea partiers. I look at the news from Iran today and I see a situation where the authorities can only respond with violence because there is no actual truth on their side. That wasn't how it was in the US in the sixties. There is always plenty of truth in the constitution of the united states. If we can only get the republicans to actually follow it.

As for JB, I talked to him on the phone some years ago. He has spent his life as a teacher in Washington state. He sounded just the same, sweet and intelligent and having a good time. I got a comment on a post from 2007, talking about vietnam and iraq, that mentioned Jack, from a girl named Ann, who said he was her father. And I was just thinking about those times. They really were exciting. There really was a sense of change in the air.

And Bob Dylan was at the White House, Tuesday night, singing "The Times They Are A'Changing" for a pbs special that is on tonight, music from the sixties. I'm looking forward to it. Dylan was bigger than protest music, but he was an important element in the civil rights struggles. Like most of us kids at the time he could see that Jim Crow could not be allowed to continue ruining people's lives. Although I grew up in Kansas, I could not see how people could continue to deny the humanity of black folk and brown folk. I know now that american racism is deep and abiding. It will be with us for generations to come. This is the true legacy of the ante-bellum south.

Well, the times are going to change. That much is certain. It is really the one true thing in this reality: nothing lasts forever. I only hope the change we come to is more positive than negative. What's that chinese curse? May you live in interesting times.

Thanks to the Lady Arianrhod for this ride on Her Silver Wheel. Her mercy is what gives me life. Her love is what gives this life meaning.

It's a Gift to Be Simple

2010-02-03T12:58:00.005-06:00

Another brief exception to the day's breathing. Will it snow? Who won the governor's nomination? Did I already eat lunch? Yes, the confusion is broadening here in the post present psyche. I've spent awhile reading through the criticism of Salinger's Franny & Zooey when it was published, and it is depressing even now, fifty years later. Everything I liked about the book was attacked by the legions of the literati, including John Updike, a perfectly nice writer, though clearly not capable of getting out of his own comfort zone.

And it is true that the nomination for the governor's office is in some doubt for both sides of the aisle here in Illinois. I expect that the current gov, Pat Quinn, will pull it out, being a few thousand votes ahead of Dan Hynes. I think Hynes might've won if his ads weren't so omnipresently negative. It was hard to see him leading us out of this shithole we call current reality. Certainly, Pat Quinn isn't going to do it.

If there is any good news today it is that Andy McKenna, the craptastic republican running for gov, who spent shitpots of his personal fortune to attack everybody else, came in third and is thus not going to be crapping on us this fall. I think whichever of the republicans that are contending and within hundreds of votes of each other, wins, they have a great chance of being governor. One of them, Kirk Dillard, even campaigned for Barack Obama, and could clearly work with the democrats to get out of the pit. I would probably vote for him over Quinn at this point. I voted for Jim Thompson a couple of times. Of course everyone knew he was gay.

Then later I read the reviews about Salinger's daughter's book about growing up with Salinger and what a dickhead he was. Unfortunately, few of these people ever read the letter Salinger's son wrote, after her book came out, in which he kind of quietly and with real pain denies pretty much everything she says.

What it shows is that whoever controls the narrative makes their version seem to be the truth. That is what the republicans are always up to. And I know that, for instance, my ex-wife's book with its reportage of incidents in my life, will be the place those things take on their reality. Even though they are wrong. Even though what she wrote is merely what she wanted to remember and to make it even a little more "artistic" than it actually was. Particularly our visit to the Cafe Au Go Go on Sunset Strip to see the rock group X. Hey, I was only there. What would I know?

But never mind. The actual truth of things only matters to shitheads like myself. And people prefer their heroes and villains to real people with boring biographies. That is just how it is. Crackalackin' to quote Chris Rock in Madagascar.

Of late I have run across old acquiantances/friends on the net. It is an odd time this moment in human history. Your life can have multiple tracks and even evince historical moments that may or may not have resonated for someone else. You can pull it down off the shelf and give it the once over.

I have exchanged emails with two different people from my high school days this last two weeks. One, Patrick Malone, was the Humphrey Democrat in the office of my high school paper, the Crusader (catholic boys school). He once accused me of listening to too much Phil Ochs. Probably true, but Pat was the mild, middle of the road guy. Though we did call him the Erection Kid, but that was mostly to get his goat. He's a successful lawyer these days. Lives in Chevy Chase, office in DC. He has written a book (The Life you Save) about dealing with medicine and doctors. I see that he was interviewed by Matt Lauer on the Today. Good for Pat. I hope he makes a lot of money. He was always a pretty good guy. Even wrote a decent novel in the late 1970s that I still have a copy of in the basement. I don't think he tried to market it, though. It was a true story of the sixties.

The other person I stumbled across is my old girl friend, Kitty Broderick. Though she is married, thirty years, to a guy named Michaud. She was my girlfriend in kindergarten through third grade, and then again sophomore and junior year of high school. She stayed in Wichita and got degreed at the catholic university. Now she teaches music at a catholic grade school. She's in her sixteenth year. She was always a smart girl, and she had a remarkable voice. Last time I saw her on stage was singing the lead in the King and I. Beautiful. She sang at both my parents' funerals. A gorgeous Ave Maria.

Well, I exchanged vast quantities of historical data with these two people. And there you have it, life passing. Another election down the tube. Another dead writer, with people saying all sorts of things that aren't really true. Can it all be helped? Do we end up with a cartoon of understanding? Really, the water swirls in the drain.

Thanks to Lady Arianrhod for this moment in this time. Let me turn in Her mercy, around and around.

J. D. Salinger, Through the Window

2010-01-28T14:00:00.007-06:00

So, Salinger is dead, at 91. He lived outside of Cornish, New Hampshire. That's near where Kimb and I got married in 1999. It's really beautiful there, the site of the Cornish Artists Colony that included Maxfield Parrish. Mountains, the Connecticut River, hundred foot stands of trees. Very nice.

Salinger. Most people that talk about him today will talk about Catcher in the Rye. It's the book most people will have read. And it is an important and special book, about adolescence and overcoming that tendency to hypocrisy that seems to grow from mere politeness and bland ego.

For me, though, Salinger was about the Glass family books. From the story "A Fine Day for Bananafish" in 9 Stories, through the weird religious saga of Franny and Zooey, and including Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenter, about Seymour Glass' wedding during world war ii in New York City, I loved the whole story.

I loved the family, Bessie Glass and her husband and their four weird kids, Seymour, Buddy, Franny and the weirdly named Zooey. Bessie was a Gallagher, good irish woman, married to a modern jewish man. They lived near Riverside Park in upper west side Manhattan. Where I lived in 1985, the year I lived in Manhattan. I used to walk those streets and imagine I could see Seymour ducking into a mom and pop grocery, or jaunting along down the path by the river, looking very 1940s, like the sort of clothes my dad would have worn at that time.

My dad was a little too old to be a contemporary of Seymour Glass, but he had that kind of look in the old photos. Seymour was a smart guy, had a phd before he was 21. He appeared on a radio show with smart kids in the thirties. This is all fiction, remember. There was no Seymour Glass. The name is even a pun: see more glass. Salinger uses it in the bananafish story.

Favorite was Franny and Zooey. I carried that paperback around in my back pocket most of junior and senior year of high school. Marcia Froelke and I used to talk about making a movie of it, with her as Franny and me as Zooey. I read it repeatedly. I loved that metaphor about the Fat Lady that Zooey uses to get Franny out of her depression. It said so much to me, that we are really all the Fat Lady. That the distinctions are hollow when they are used to make some people feel better and other people feel worse. And that the existentialist dilemma doesn't mean give it, it means be brave and do it anyway. If nothing has longterm meaning, then doing something because it means something to you gives it meaning, at least to you. And what else is there, ultimately?

So I'll probably go home and dig out Bessie Gallagher Glass and read the part where she argues with Zooey, who is sitting in the bathtub, curtain pulled, trying to read the script of a play written to be done on television. Zooey is an actor, and yes, in the fifties, people put on plays on tv. Playhouse 90, and really many shows did this.

Of course they are all smoking cigarettes. Bessie has a pack right in her kimono housecoat. I think they are menthols. I may just be imagining that because I smoked menthols, in the days that I smoked.

Well. I got a lot from Salinger. And I was never too bothered by the recluse stuff. I imagine the fame thing didn't please him much. His life was probably never the same after Catcher. I recently read a book about Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird. And it really made clear why she never wrote another book. This happened to Salinger too. After the end of the fifties it just seemed like he could never really go anywhere with anything. I think fame just fucks up some people's lives.

Thanks to the Lady for this day and for every day. I am grateful for Her mercy.

Dysfunctional Political System, Ours

2010-01-28T09:39:00.003-06:00

Obama's State of the Union speech was typically wonderful. He says what needs to be said. He's funny, and he calls things the way they should be called. Will it make any difference?

The republicans do not give a crap about the country we live in. They are there strictly for power for the aristocracy, for the people in business and law that really run things for their own benefit. The democrats are there for many different groups, but not for the one group they should be there for, everybody. And the democrats are simply cowards in every way. Particularly people like Ben Nelson. And that guy with the anti-choice mission, Stupak. These are people who are much more intent on getting their way then in solving the problems of the entire country.

You are watching the end of america's greatness. Of course it is no surprise that with a person of color in the white house, the powers that be are going out of their way to destroy the illusion of democracy here. They want the lower classes to learn a big lesson. Don't fuck with us or we'll reduce you to complete and abject poverty.

Who will be left in the middle class in ten years? Probably almost no one. How rich will the rich be? Much richer then they are now.

Where will this lead?

Some form of tragedy, either revolution or world war or chaos on a large scale. Who will come out of this the best? Probably the chinese and the indians. The arabs will continue to destroy their world. The Americans will destroy themselves. The europeans will try and ride the wave. They may do it, being more liberal and going the middle way. But they will have to fend off the dark cultures of islam. And religious wars have been a way of life in europe before. We will see where this takes us.

And africa will enter a period of a sort of social cannibalism, where the rightwing religious people will dominate and destroy the culture in the name of the book's old testament god, the really fucked up one. Africa is going to get to about the 14th century in this next hundred years. Still there to be exploited by the rich.

In the end human life will go on for awhile. There's bound to be a great deal of unnecessary pain and cruel death due to the rich people's imperatives. The humorous part is when they die and face the light. They get to find out what assholes they have been and they get to live through what their actions have cost the rest of us. They don't believe this will happen. But it will.

So what you see in Washington, D.C., are thousands of humans wearing the blinkers of self importance and single issue ideas. They represent us all, of course. And it seems to me that it is an accurate representation of america today. We all think it's about just us and that everybody else should give us our way. And we think we all have the solution to everything for everybody. This is how a house of roommates breaks up. This is how a marriage ends. This is how a great country becomes a squirrly mess of stupid twits fighting over privilege while the poor and the children die and are screwed out of any hope.

I still think Obama can be a great president, but I don't think the rest of the politicians are going to let him. It does show that Sarah Palin would get nothing done either. She has no skills for advancing legislation. But of course Republicans want nothing more than the government to collapse around us. Particularly social security. Then they can hire their help for even less money.

My hope is pretty much just about the Lady now. Her mercy is all that keeps me going. Her love is what underpins all life. Why people don't get that, I just don't know. Sorry to be such a downer. He gave a great speech.

Democrats: Pass. The. Damn. Bill.

2010-01-26T11:02:00.003-06:00

Things are screwed up here in Dodge. There's no doubt of that. Not enough money in the state to pay for everything that has been paid for. I blame the previous governor and the previous president. That said I wish the present governor would just talk about raising revenue and keeping the schools open. All he seems concerned with now is fighting it out with Dan Hynes for the nomination. It won't matter because I think there is a pretty good chance the Republicans will get the governor's post back in the fall. The dems are doing too good a job of shooting each other in the foot.

But that is our politics. The Republicans all work for the same basic master, the oligarchs that have the money and run things, and the democrats work for all sorts of different groups that inevitably want to have their vision run things. Thus the health care mess we now have.

I am pretty much with Andrew Sullivan on this: The house should pass the senate bill. It is far from great, but failure to pass it now with the debacle in Massachusetts will pretty much end the possibilities of this presidency. At least Obama will get one more supreme court justice on the bench. But, really, these people seem pretty much determined to screw things up. And by these people I mean the democrats in the house.

And I have my problems with the dems in the senate also. This whole situation is insane. The really sad part is this: when the dems lose and the republicans run things again, the dems won't be able to stand up to them the way the republicans stand up to the in power dems. They'll be far too busy fighting among themselves.

It all boils down to money talks in our government. And now that the rightwing supreme court has voted to allow the oligarchs all over the world to pump as much money into our electin process as they desire I think we all know that that means democracy as a representative of the common man is over. Tell this to the teabaggers though and they won't be able to understand how they completely empower the rich and fascist to run things. The teabaggers are really just too upset about that black guy in the white house. Nevermind that the guy is someone who made himself, who studied and worked hard and understood things and tried very hard. The fact that the man is black is the bottom line.

Racism, that gift from the south's embrace of slavery, is probably that which actually kills the united states of america. Certainly there are millions of people in the south who would gladly embrace an alternate country that put white people back on the top, overtly (since they are still there subvertly).

Anyway, the good news is that season three of Mad Men comes out on DVD in March. Just gotta hang on for a couple of months.

I hope the Lady Arianrhod will remember me in Her merciful song.

Three Eyed from Phil Dick, Or Something

2010-01-13T12:58:00.002-06:00

On the farthest edge of things: You know, according to the astrophysicts, we live in what is known as "the local group". That descriptor refers to a group of approximately 7 galaxies of which our Milky Way is but one. Andromeda and its near neighbors are also in this group. Now we are talking real estate here that extends for literally billions of lightyears. Even to take a picture of the scene you will have a necessarily historic component. All that light took so damn long to get here.

When you look at the photographs from the Hubble you see the utter meaningless of human measure. We are less than atomic, scale-wise. And the one end to the otherness of the known universe is simply a typically human response, naming something lets you pretend you have a handle on it.

I suppose that is what bothers me most about human life: We can instantly imagine ourselves at the center of all that exists. This is partially because we are conscious, and partially because all organisms are driven by self interest.

So it is really no surprise that religion(s) have difficulty dealing with the actual information that comes from truly observing the universe. It points up, again and again, that those bromides that most religions bank on, are pretty much the foolish whining of the recalcitrant puppy dog, denied his shoe to chew upon. We are not the most important part of creation. We aren't even part of an important part of creation.

Now the science guys have their own blindness about the universe, too. It goes like this: The universe is so vast there must be plenty of other intelligent species out there. Why haven't we found an adequately hard science evidence of any of them? Doesn't this mean we are the only game in all creation? I remain Knoepfle telling me this in the 1970s and I thought to myself, there's pretty much no hope for this guy.

The most obvious argument to this assertion is this: It's too damn big. The speed of light is a hard limit. But even if someone/thing figured out how to go from here to there not in millions of years, what are the odds they might find this particular small planet out of the trillions that are there? And don't tell me about broadcasts trundling through the ether. The odds are simply too long either way.

For there to be contact with an alien race that is conscious in the manner that we are would to my mind be pretty much on the same order as winning the lottery. It can happen, but the odds, in this case, are so long that it is just unlikely.

Which is too bad. Another intelligent species from some other place in the universe would really fuck with the Book religions, wouldn't it? Of course, the xtians would immediately call the aliens "spawn of satan" and all that and they'd be utterly concerned with how this new race "did it". It would really be cool if that race needed three members to reproduce, or if it laid eggs that hatched. No jesus or mohammed for those guys.

The other high point of my day today was reading one of those sad paranoid xtian patriot sites that discussed how the Wizard of Oz was completely a tool of the Illuminati to turn children into slaves. The same article eventually had some seriously anti-catholic stuff in it. And of course it hated the government and proclaimed there is no democracy in the USA. We vote, but we've all been brain-washed, so it isn't a true vote. If we weren't brainwashed we'd all see things like the guy who put the site up. His primary criticism of the Masons and Illuminati is that they teach you that the solution to life's problems is in yourself. This apparently is what "Satan" wants us to believe, so that we don't go ask Yeshua and his derivatives (like this guy) to save our pasty skins from damnation.

The Wizard of Oz. Which by the by stands for Oziris, the Egyptian God who was dismembered by His own brother. Of course Isis, His Sister and His Wife, found all the pieces, save one, and put them back together. Now it is my sworn duty, and every man's sworn duty, to fill in for Osiris for that one piece the fish ate that Osiris needs to bring back the harvest.

Well, my back is killing me these days. I struggle more some days than others. I quit drinking hard liquor and I do believe that beer and wine are following the hard stuff out the door. I'm afraid its still about twenty years until legal pot shows up. Probably have a doobie right before I kick the bucket. Oh well. Time to go to sleep.

Thanks to the Lady for this existence. I am glad She is a merciful creator and I understand that most of what happens is part of a natural process. She loves me, that much I am sure.

Divine Bear Surveys the New Year in a Personal Way

2010-01-06T10:29:00.002-06:00

I am thinking pretty seriously of taking down the poetry blog entirely. No one but me has been there in the last four weeks, despite my having posted two new poems. As it is already invited readers only, there are just six people who might have visited. But it is mainly just me.

As for politics, I believe this country has doomed itself with what the rightwing has subjected us to. I believe there is a real spirit of discontent in this land. But I also believe that the hideous racism of the south drives most of the energy that could be spent going after the oligarchs. Like so much of history, this world is driven by rich and powerful men seeking advantage for themselves and for their families. All else is bullshit uttered by those men to control the rest of us.

I will however continue to post about movies I like. Mainly from the far past. I watched "I Married a Witch" the other day, with Veronica Lake. She was sooooo hot. Much hotter than any star out there today. Maybe Lily Cole (she's not a star, just a model, but she did do that Terry Gilliam movie recently). Anyway, this was a pretty silly movie, about a witch and her father put to the torch by the puritans and cursing the man who made the charges. And then three hundred years later they get released from where they were confined back to the same little new england town where the ancestor of that man is now running for governor.

From there it gets predictable. They, the witch and her father, are going after this guy, but the witch falls for him and then she has to contend with her father. It was an okay, not great movie. But there were some scens in it with Veronica Lake wearing things that really showed off her body. And she had that fabulous hair. She was very sexy indeed.

Meanwhile the day trips by here in Champaign. We are waiting for the honking big snow that will come tomorrow. Can't wait. We'll get through it, but it won't be fun.

Thanks to the Lady for giving me hope.

Childhood, Early Grade School

2010-01-06T09:55:00.005-06:00

In the 1960s I was in late grade school and then in high school and early college. My brother Greg was not quite two years younger than me and so was two years back in school. Grade school was spent at All Saints School in Wichita, Kansas. Both of myolder sisters had gone there. My sister Diane is five years in front of me, and Kathy is seven. So when I was in kindergarten Kathy would have been in the seventh grade. I remember my brother Greg coming to school with me in kindergarten and becoming so frightened of the nun, that he hid under a table and would not come out. I was horribly embarrassed. Eventually they summoned my sister to ride him home on her bicycle. That must have been a truly terrible experience for Kathy. Greg probably doesn't remember this at all. He was just three, of course.

In kindergarten I had a couple of girlfriends. One, Nylas Moser, lived across Lincoln Street on Rutan, the street we lived on. She was a nice, mousy looking little girl who was very nice as I recall. My other girlfriend was Kitty Broderick. She was cute as a bug and had banana curls. At that time my idea of glamour came from old movies watched on the television my Uncle had given us when I was four. Some of those women had banana curls too, and I loved them.

Kitty and I were something of an item into third grade. That year we had a "lay" teacher, a big deal at a catholic school in the fifties. A bigger deal was that this woman was a "negro". It took me quite awhile to figure out what that meant, by the way. She was mainly a teacher to me. She taught me how to read, something that had barely been touched by that point. I spent the rest of my grade school life ruining my grades by reading constantly in the fictional world.

Also in third grade was the incident where Kitty and I were caught kissing in the cloakroom during recess time. Our class had won the aquarium for most parents at PTA that month and they took it away from us to punish us. Not too fair to the less horny kids in the class, eh?

Anyway, Kitty's family moved to Magdalen parish after that. So I had to get a new female obsession. In a side note I will tell you that Kitty and I dated in high school years, sophomore and junior year. Eventually I discovered she was seeing this other guy and I quit calling her. This has been a pattern in my life: rather than fight things I tend to just fold the tent and get out of there. She was a pretty girl, but I was quite interested in finding a girl to have sex with (I was 16-17). And I knew that even if I could get Kitty to have sex with me (something I didn't work very hard at trying), her father was the black irishman type who might actually kill me if I did and he found out.

By fourth grade I had settled on a girl named Barbara Lace, who lived near the park we frequented (Schweitzer Park?), just off Lincoln. Her family promptly moved to England about that time. Probably the most important aspect of what Barb Lace brought to my table is that most of my fantasies about her (I am 9 at this point) were about getting her naked.

It is amazing to me the importance of nakedness in our culture's view of sex and sexuality. The revelation of what she looks like "naked". Well, of course we all look more or less the same, but that doesn't seem to make much difference, once you get a yen for someone.

My gay friend, Gary, the one in Illinois, once said that he had had so much sex with so many different men because after you satisfied the curiosity what else was there? I have a more complex view of my sexuality than that. I have it all tangled up with the power dynamic, who's in control. Plus I have that most desperate of teen age boy psychological statements: If you loved me you'd ... I don't know, suck my cock, walk naked in the garden, shave your genitals. You get the general idea.

Let's back track here. Let's start before grade school at the catholic school. Yes, roman catholicism has certainly colored my sexuality. But even before I started going to school I was hooked on sex (not that I knew what sex was; certainly I did not). Blame playboy. Or blame the little girl next door. When we moved into the house on Rutan my father found a Playboy in the garage and put it in the trash (after looking through it). I stole it from the trash and took it out to the playhouse behind the garage and looked at it. I was primarily interested in bottoms, as I recall. To this day I am not much for breasts, though I was a bottle baby. In any case, I note that it was 1954, and I believe there were only two publications of Playboy that year, the first year it existed. One of them of course had the Marilyn Monroe picture in it.

The other incident that started when we moved into that house was that the little girl next door, Jill Frost, taught me a jolly game we played in the backyard, in the playhouse. It was nazi soldier and girl spy and I got to take her clothes off of her and "torture" her for her information. We both loved this game. It was primarily the nudity that we got off on and the torture was mild pretend stuff we didn't even know what torture would be.

Perhaps as many as four times we played this pretty hot game. She was a charming little blonde girl and I still tend to the nordic as far as type goes (though, frankly, I've been all over the chart). Eventually she wanted to play this game one day when nobody else was around and I said only if she would walk through the backyard naked and she refused. So I said I wouldn't play anymore.

And that is pretty much the story of my sexual life. I tend to be interested in someone, even obsessed by them, until they refuse something. When that happens, I may stay with them for awhile, but my mind wanders away, thinking about other women, other girls. Somebody who will love me no matter what I demand of them. So there can be no other reason for this dynamic than that I have no actual self confidence. For this I think we can thank my mother, primarily, for insisting that you either were great or you were nothing. In my family you were not allowed to be average or normal. You had fucking well better be much better than most people. Much smarter, primarily. We were all smart little assholes and we were driven to compete and do better than anyone and if we didn't than we were a big fucking disappointment.

So, I was probably the biggest disappointment of all. And I admit, today, I am bitterly disappointed in the choices I made all through my life. Did I learn anything from all of this? To some extent I learned some things. But I have never been any good, whatsoever, at competing for anything. I still back right off. When my second wife Becky Bradway fell in love with Kevin Stein in 1993, what did I do? I tried, very hard, to kill myself. To get out of the competition. To just get away from being the loser.

Despite the fact that I spent most of my childhood losing every game, over and over again to my little brother, Greg, I never learned how to accept that as anything but a definition of myself. I once again blame my mother for this. She told me, over and over again in my childhood, that it was my responsibility to give in to my two little brothers. And to give in to my older sisters. She trained me to be the person who takes the shit. I am a great little shit taker. Except when I'm not, and then I have an anger problem.

Recently Jessica the Witch, who prefers I don't use her last name, said something to me in an email that I thought was among the most profound things anyone has ever told me. She said that if someone were to give her three wishes she would use all three of them to take back words and deeds she has done in her life. Boy, do I know what she means by that.

Sometimes I desperately wish I could dig out of this hole. Other times I understand the reason that death is greeted gladly by the ancient of days. At some point getting out of the race truly is the right thing to do. Meanwhile I have children and plenty of debt. I can't afford not just to quit, but I'll never retire. I owe way too much money. I'll work until something kills me. As for my sex life, I hope it isn't coming to an end, but I have had some minor prostate problems, so we will see how that develops in this sixtieth year.

Holiday Movies

2009-12-29T12:35:00.004-06:00

Holidays and Holiday entertainments. When I think of xmas movies I first think of Bell, Book and Candle. Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, supported by Jack Lemmon, Elsa Lanchester, Hermione Gingold, and the inimitable Ernie Kovacs. It's a movie about witches living in Manhattan in 1960. Novak plays a witch, somewhat bored with her life and her powers, who decides to take Stewart, a publisher, away from his fiancee, a woman the Novak character tangled with in her college days. Of course along the way she falls in love with Stewart, and ceases being a witch because of it. It's sentimental and set, in the beginning, at xmas time.

I particularly like Jack Lemmon in this movie. He plays Novak's character's younger brother, a warlock. He's terrible at making money and always broke. Somewhere along the way he hooks up with the Ernie Kovacs' character, Sidney Redlitch, a writer who writes about the occult. Elsa Lanchester is the older aunt to the two witches and she is also a witch, though her powers are even more meager than Lemmon's. Hermione Gingold plays the grande dame witch who's potion breaks Novak's spell on Jimmy Stewart. She is quite funny in her main scene, and she also has some small pieces with Kovacs who is wonderful, drinking and smoking his ever present cigar.

Of course, my wife and I consider this our movie, though neither of us are witches, nor do we practice the craft. We just like the people and the interaction this piece portrays. It was originally a broadway play and it was quite successful. I don't really know how it came to the screen, but it was well handled and it is so very entertaining. I never get tired of it. Of course, now I have my own Kimberly. And she has charmed me in her own specific and wonderful way. No need of witchcraft. I count myself lucky to have attracted her interest at all. At the time, some 13 years ago now, I prayed to the Goddess Arianrhod every night. I didn't ask Her for Kimb, or for anyone exactly. I asked her for a partner that would be right for me. So it was truly wonderful when this woman, much younger than myself, turned out to be so very simpatico for the old failed writer. True mercy there. So, if anyone wonders why I am not an atheist, or why I believe the weird things I believe, I say this one thing supports my whole belief system, no problem.

And christmas? Christ Mass? I know that it is the return of life, marked by the lengthening of days, that makes this time of year truly important. And I don't begrudge the fact that the xtians needed to graft their imagined cosmology onto a natural event that had been celebrated by humans for literally tens of thousands of years. That was something the xtians were good at, that they god from the romans, using the pre-existing gods/goddesses/holy days to stand for things they needed to push onto local populations to rule over them.

It doesn't change what is really important here: The Wheel Turning. Yes folks, all that any holy day really stands for is the changing of time from season to season, from moment to moment, marking those that have stood here before us and anticipating those that will stand here after we have left the building.

Consciousness is about remembering life in its mutable dance. Those that have lived. Those that have spoken and those that have loved and those that have died. And it is about the ability to imagine tomorrow. Imagine all the people, living life in peace. We really are all dreamers. We all know these things are possible.

Where we lose our connection to the divine is when ego, generally ego, causes us to choose to believe things that are not actually true. Like gay is a choice, or abortion is completely different than miscarriage, or that one person's race makes him/her a certain kind of personality. Ludicrous concepts, bitterly cherished by people who's egos are wounded by their lives and their choices.

I also like the Alistair Sim Christmas Carol. It's the only really good one, yet Hollywood keeps remaking this story, poorly. And now this version has been edged out at the local video store. There's a kharmic price to be paid for this. Those directors and producers have something to confront when they pass over. In any case, Sim's Scrooge will always be the one to remember. And particularly, when he awakens in the morning and knows he can save himself. He has come to admit the lies he has told himself, and now he is free to live in the truth and be happy. Good stuff. Everyone should see this movie.

Finally, Love Actually. That is a good holiday movie that pulls us together. And it even has a sad story, the man nearly cheating on his perfectly wonderful wife. Alan Rickman, who plays Snape in the Harry Potter movies, is perfect for this part. He doesn't actually want to do it, but the girl who entices him makes it difficult to resist. Then he ends up hurting his wife, played by Emma Thompson. This downer sets up the rest of this movie and Hugh Grant's, as the Prime Minister, chance at love. It is a silly heartfelt movie. I also like the part where the guy romances his best friend's wife, but not in a bad way. Just letting her know how speical she is. Very sweet. May have to see it again now, just to re-live those moments.

I've been thinking about old movies for awhile now, due to a post on Self-Styled Siren's blog, about re-viewing old movies. Surely I have done plenty of that in my life. But it is harder now than it used to be. There used to be old movies all over tv. You could find all sorts of things from long ago. And there are movies I've seen like fifty times because of that. But now, now the cable waves are filled with recently produced dreck that holds no one's attention for very long. That's why we have remote controls. So we can flip around and avoid any slow moment.

Sad, isn't it? Anyway, this about does it for Tim's mildly nostalgic xmas movies post on a blog that essentially nobody reads anymore, even my friends. I suppose that is par for the course. After I'm dead and gone, my children will look through these and read some of them, if only to remember the old man. Hopefully there will too many of these posts for them to actually get through. I can go on and on. I have copies of all the letters I wrote in the 1970s and 1980s to prove it. I averaged about 3000 words a day in those days. I can't imagine anyone ever read all those letters, except for me, of course. I read them and thought they were great. I am just a lousy critic of my own work. Probably why it is as rambly as it is. Conversational tone and all that. Oh well.

I know I will live and die in your arms, Sweet Lady. Thank you for this gift of this time in the sun, my beautiful wife, my wonderful daughters, my charming son. All those people who's lives have touched me so much. All the scenes of natural world beauty that beguile me, particularly the woods and the streams and the rocky trail. Thank You for Your mercy. I have truly needed it and You have always brought it to me.

Aboard the Ship As It Lists into Port

2009-12-15T11:01:00.003-06:00

The week before xmas week here in the midwest. Or really the eastern edge of the central part of the usa. Next Friday my family is taking the City of New Orleans to Jackson, Mississippi, to spend the holidays with my in-laws. This bodes well, and I am happy to have it to look forward to. We get along just fine and I can do some of the cooking there. Their house is quite comfortable and Ms. Piper will have a jolly time.

We usually do the zoo in Jackson, and the science museum. They recently re-did their art musuem, which was a wretched hole, and it's now quite nice. Some good stuff and well presented. Points to whoever engineered this reversal.

There is also a more than decent greek restaurant there that perhaps we will spend an afternoon at, having the lamb and the dolmas and all the good stuff.

Politics
It's really difficult to comment now, so much of what exists in the political world is merely contention for the sake of contention. Things are gradually getting better in the way of financial reality, but so many people are out of jobs that is bound to have a profound effect on bottom lines and tax revenues.

Personally I haven't been particularly disappointed by Obama's administration. They have heeled to the center and tried to accomplish things in the face of the rightwing noise machine. I am not pleased with how many things have gone, but I am not particularly surprised by them, either. Now there is a lot of blowback from the liberal blogs about the disappointment that Obama is for them. I feel kind of bad for them, feeling that way. But the way things work for us it is never going to be that easy.

Sure we elected sixty democratic senators. But the fact is we didn't really do that. Lieberman is an independent, as is the senator from Vermont. And we know that Lieberman is just a bitter old man, headed straight for history's dustbin with his reputation as a jerk signed and sealed now. And some of the democratic centrists tread a fine line as to their political philosophy and standing. Ben Nelson is from Nebraska. He is under the illusion that people in Nebraska are not as financially strapped as them big city liberals. He is, of course, wrong, but he thinks he needs to play it a certain way to be re-elected. It is probably really impossible to move the ship of state very much in any given iteration of presidential power. It is much easier to poke holes below the waterline. That is what GWB and his frenzied Veep managed to do. We shall see if Obama can keep the vessel floating for four or eight years.

If we do get to a second term, I think we will see a somewhat less centrist position. But Obama has always been about the art of the possible. And I think, from reading his books, that we can count on him being ultimately a centrist in terms of programs. As to the wars, that is another subject. I think Obama will extract us from both of those wars before the 2012 elections, as an act of political need.

Well, I'm lousy at predictions, so don't mind me. It's just a hard time for the good old USA.

Thanks to the Lady for another day with my remarkable wife and child. May you all learn to see Her love and feel Her mercy in the passing of sun and moon and the singing of wind and rain.

The Grey Lady's New Clothes

2009-12-09T09:45:00.003-06:00

I don't read the Washington Post anymore, though I did read it for most of my adult life. In the last two or three years it has really morphed into something truly awful. The people that run the Post clearly are now part of the rightwing noise machine. There is little attempt made to ever respond to the ludicrous statements the right continues to invent to weaken the Obama administration.

This comes to a head, I think, this week. The Post has apparently published an expanded version of Sarah Palin's Facebook rant concerning whether global warming is real and whether President Obama should go to the summit in Copenhagen. She talks about scare tactics and junk science. As someone pointed out in the comments section at HuffPost, this is "richly ironic" since scare tactics is one of her primary tools in advancing her career and her party. All she has ever been able to say about Obama and the democrats is that they are "scary". Palin is the person who invented and popularized "death panels" as part of the debate on health care. She is busy telling everybody that Obama and Pelosi and Reid are destroying america and we'd better wake up and throw them out and put her and her ilk in.

Yet she offers no actual solutions and she reveals no actual understanding of how the world works, either the financial world, or the world of international affairs. She is basically concerned with transferring money to the rich, from the rest of us. And she is entirely concerned with sending the jews all back to greater Israel, as is called for in the book of Revelations. Middle east be damned. Screw the palestinians and all the other arabs, standing in god's way.

And she is clearly accepted by the mainstream media as the face of the republican party. We are in some serious trouble I have to say. And the drag of her and her statements is to the far right. It moves all republicans further and further into the sphere of the religious fundamentalists that would remake this country as a "christian" society. They would like to outlaw contraception, along with abortion. They would like to re-criminalize all forms of sexual behaviour outside of biblical marriage. They are essentially equivalent to the Mullahs that enforce Sharia Law in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

When global warming does its real trip on us you will see Sarah P. and her fellow travelers state not that they were wrong, but that god is judging us for allowing homosexuals to hav average, normal lives. They will say that all natural disasters were brought upon us by that nasty jerk of a god that rules the old testament.

And a lot of people will believe them, just as a billion people believe in the weirdness that is taught in the Q'uran. It's hard not to see religious wars heating up in the near future. Frankly, the "war" with Al Queda and the Taliban is essentially a religious war. And religious wars persist as long as their are believers out there.

Sorry to be so pessimistic, but the Washington Post was the news organization that pursued the Watergate scandal that ended with Nixon's resignation. Those were the days my friend. Those days are clearly gone. The WaPo didn't even try to take down George W. Bush, who committed far worse crimes than Dick Nixon. They joined in the party all the way. It makes you wonder what they think up there in la la land, the rich and powerful. They have designed the situation we find ourselves in because of their needs for power and money. Anothe mighty institution has fallen.

The Washington Post really can't go out of business fast enough. The health of the republic demands it.

And Sarah Palin represents the real anti-christ. She is willing to say anything and do anything for money and power and she understands only that which is about her personally. She would be a president that would make George W. Bush seem nuanced by comparison.

May the Lady's mercy save us from these people. May we awaken to our faults and find our way through this Her creation with respect and grace. Thanks to the Lady for even the chance to live here.

The Lady and the Tiger, Please Choose

2009-12-08T09:38:00.002-06:00

The week shudders to a halt. No one reads this blog, officially. The stats for the last week include only my visits. Very humbling.

Tiger Woods turns out to be a pretty typical rich guy. He's on the road, he's got the scratch. He's banging whatever blonde barbie he runs into. This is surprising how? There is that biological imperative here. My wife says, "But his wife is beautiful! Why would he cheat on her?" Every male knows there is a biological imperative behind that. Yes, the best thing for the self and for the race is to form a partnership, have children, do a good job raising them. But there is also a core motivation in the male: spread the seed around. Make babies in various combinations. The more combinations the better the odds are that your genetic trace will survive and dominate in any given grouping. Yawn. This is just not that interesting.

As a human with a consciousness of self, and an understanding of how the universe works, we have the ability to control those core motivations that are built into the machine. So the reality is we do a little bit of both: we sow some wild oats, as they say, and then we pair off and really reproduce. This is how it has always been, and it probably always will be this to some extent. Now that there are way too many of our species screwing up the planet, we have gotten ahold of some techniques to hold down the reproductive aspect of having sex.

Men are going to have sex, if only with themselves. That does not make them bad guys. It is having sex and imagining that there is no responsibility for what it does to you and to your partner that makes some men "bad". Frankly, it is self centeredness that has never been questioned that creates most of the problems for the species.

Tiger is unfortunately the more common version of the well off, ambitious male. It is now really between him and his wife. If she is smart she will leave him, because it is very unlikely he is going to change now. Why should he change? His validation is all about winning golf tournaments and having blonde women sleep with him. Why would he change?

And will this destroy his career selling things for other people? Nah. Other men look at him and wish they were him. The only similar question I have at this time is this: Is gambling Michael Jordan's form of cheating? One wonders.

I'm sure there will be far too much time spent on this subject in the next few weeks. Happy Solstice folks.

I ask the Lady's mercy for my own failings, both in the past and in the present. One thing I am sure of is that She knows how we were made and how we have dealt with that. We do have choice. That is the important aspect of all being.

Old Friend

2009-12-01T09:33:00.003-06:00

Well, I heard from my friend, Corlyss, yesterday morning that Pat Smith died on Thanksgiving. I sent out a few emails, to people I knew would want to know. My friend in Los Angeles told me he had already been called by Pat's daughter, and Jessica the Witch told me that Jake Smith had called her. So the grapevine passed the word. And I sent a couple of private emails out to people I've known a long time who knew both Pat and me, but nobody wrote me back.

With my current health issues, the subject of leaving the planet has been on my mind a lot. I lived with Pat Smith from the spring of 1973 until July of 1981, when I left our apartment on South Grand and moved in, initially, with Greg Lakebrink, and later with Bradway.

Pat was married to Larry Smith most of those years. They had two children together and there didn't seem to be a big reason to divorce him. He didn't seem to care at that time. Darned if I know. We lived on Scarritt Street in central Springfield for most of that time. It was in that house that the Scarritt Occasional Society was born. That later morphed into Scarritt Associates. It was a writing group and I also helped Knoepfle produce a series of poetry chapbooks. Most of those people we published eventually became part of the Scarritt reality.

Pat had had a production company of a sort with Sandy Martin Knoll. They taught a class in producing a magazine at SSU. Pat and Larry lived across the street from John and Sandy. Somewhere along the way there Pat and John Knoll had an extended affair. Ironically, Pat later found John Knoll in St. Louis and married him there sometime in this last decade. I guess his love for her was real.

My love for Pat was also real, but it wasn't enough. Somewhere along the line I realized that Pat didn't really care for my writing. We were both pretty much beer alcoholics by then. I couldn't see how my being there was any good for her at all. And I felt I had wasted years of her life, living off of her income while I struggled to be some sort of writer. Something I knew she didn't think would ever happen. Of course, it didn't happen. I wrote tons of things, but never tried to publish them.

I'd say the one good thing I promoted in Pat's life was her own writing. She wrote several novels in that period that we were together. She also wrote some fine poems, and we published a chapbook of her pieces entitled "The Museum Is Closed." There are poems in that book that are addressed to me, and they are very beautiful, but dark. That came out in the period that our relationship was becoming frayed.

And of course I was always also in love with and involved with Janne that entire time. That didn't help. Nor did the other love affairs that passed through both of our lives. Pat eventually was good friends with Janne. And I hear from JR that Keats, Pat's daughter, called Janne this last week. Some mild irony there.

Pat Smith. Well, I loved her and I miss her. She changed towards me, of course. After I left her we were sort of mild friends, but eventually she became quite cold towards me. Understandable. She was in her forties when we broke up. I don't really know how it all went for her after that. I saw her on the street in 1986, after returning from living in New York City. She was clearly disappointed I was still with Becky Bradway.

Later I saw her one day while I was walking with Paige home from the 7/11 in the old neighborhood in Springfield that I lived in for 12 years. In one of those odd notes, I lived on the corner of 10th and Bryn Mawr and Pat lived about two blocks away, halfway down the block on Yale, the next street over from 10th. We lived within blocks of each other for, well, many years. I knew which house was her's, but by then I was sort of scared of her. After Becky left me in 1993 I called Pat up and asked her for Janne's number. That really pissed her off, I think. And she told me she didn't have it, but that was not true.

Odd how these things go. It was just as well I didn't speak with Janne at that time. She was busy having her son that fall of 1993. Janne would've been a 42 year old mother then, so hearing from me, all dissolute and despairing about my cheating wife, wouldn't have helped her in any way. So Pat was right to steer me away.

So, in many ways Scarritt was a good place for me. I did a lot of writing, I had a lot of friends who were writers. We had some serious parties. We danced, we smoked pot, we drank a lot of beer. Of course with Janne I drank scotch. Pat favored irish when she drank hard stuff. But mostly in those days we drank vast quantities of bottled beer. And we had people over all the time, so everyone drank a lot of that stuff. It was for all practical purposes a classic salon. People felt free to just drop by and drink and hang with me. And with Pat.

Pat was a good hostess. She had certain things she could cook, and I had certain things I could cook. We did lots and lots of rock and roll music. Pat was deep into certain areas of pop music. I remember the Beatles were always important. Before we were actually involved I remember going to see the Rolling Stones in St. Louis with Pat and John Knoll. I think that is when I first started seeing her romantically.

Magazines. Living with Pat was the first time I ever spent a lot of time with someone who read many many magazines. We always had subscriptions to New York, New Yorker, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Creem, and we bought tons of magazines, mainly men's magazines, Penthouse, Playboy and Club. I look back on that with some embarrassment. But things had changed so much from the fifties it was sort of where the seventies led us. We were all much more open about sex and sexuality than we are even now. Something about the time and place? I don't know.

Pat was an obsessive re-reader. She had authors that she re-read like crazy. Particularly Georgette Heyer. On the weekends she would often get out a stack of books and pile them up by her and then whip through them, reading the parts she really liked. She might go through fifty books in a weekend, no problem. I do that some myself, though never on her scale. She'd be sitting there on the couch with a glass of beer and a cigarette, and she'd be laughing and crying at the same time. She smoked Kents and we drank Pabst Blue Ribbons mainly.

We went to a lot of garage sales, estate sales, and auctions. Pat loved buying beautiful things for low bucks. She came from pretty good Chicago-area roots, so she knew quality stuff. In those days you could often find really remarkable pieces at those sales. Later they came to be dominated by dealers and people looking to get on PBS. But Pat bought a few very nice things at those sales. I really respected her abilities.

I was a shitty partner for her. She deserved better. And she wasn't a great partner for me, either. But we had a lot of good times and I remember those years well. I have vast quantities of documentation, of course. I even have a file folder of house notes that Pat and I would leave each other. She had beautiful, even remarkable handwriting. Very chic. As a matter of fact she was pretty darn chic for a girl from the western suburbs who went to ISU.

And she was a great mom, too. She spent the time on her kids and had enormous patience with them. And they both turned out great, of course. No surprise. They were smart people and their parents were both engaged in their lives. My son, Joel, probably never had a friend as sweet as Jake Smith. They spent a lot of time together in the summers when Joel would come from Oregon. I had a fairly rocky relationship with Pat's daughter, Keats. But I knew she was smart and would have an interesting life. Keats also wrote most of a novel in those days, about a girl named Annette. I still have pieces of that manuscript in my files.

I also remember that Jake Smith was the first person I knew with a personal computer. I think it was a TRS80 that he got his grandfather, Jim Hilton, to buy him. I remember helping him program a simple game, at the long table in the South Grand Avenue apartment, must've been 1980-81. You could see his mind working. It was fun.

Well. Life is what it is. I hope to be around for some more years. At this point I would hope I have as many as Pat had. But you don't really know. She was a lot more responsible than me. I can't seem to hold anything together. I was wondering why Pat got so much of the credit for the old Scarritt days, but now I think that perhaps I wasn't as central to all that as I imagined at the time. I was pretty much a pretentious young jerk. I know this because I have all the audio tapes that Cheryl Frank made of that group and I have listened to them. I do not come off great. Pat's on them too. Particularly the tape of the Illinois Writers group reading at their spring do in the spring of 1979. Pat is slightly drunk and she is reading some things that really cut you up (well, me in particular). Her poetry always struck me as very similar in tone to Ann Sexton, another good episcopalian woman who had to deal with suicide in her life. What did Pat always say? The dark night of the soul.

I ask the Lady for Her mercy for the spirit that is Pat now. May we all walk with Lady into that valley and beyond into the sunlight of our truth.

Sadie Mae's Testimony

2009-11-24T11:07:00.004-06:00

I just spent a significant amount of time reading a document on the web that purports to be a short book by Susan Atkins, saying what she has to say about what really happened in August of 1969 and before that, during her years with the Manson group. I've had a long time interest in this story, primarily because of the time it is set, and what I myself was doing in those days. While I loved the sixties and what went down, there was always this implicit danger.

We, I mean people my age at that time, were pretty gullible in general. We desired to believe in fantastic things. People have always done that and they do that now. Perhaps what made it different then was that what had gone before was so deliberately controlled and false, a pretend order that had been shown to be false. Bad things happened anyway. The Kennedys and Martin Luther King. The war in southeast asia.

In any case, the need to have a fantastic universe to actually live in was exacerbated by the use of psychedelics. But using one drug often got you involved with other drugs. I think the psychedelics were not, of themselves, terribly damaging. But I do think that damaged psyches using them could become even more damaged. And I saw that happen.

In any case, Atkin's version of the story pretty much leans on the drugs made us stupid and crazy and mainly Charlie got paranoid about going back to prison so we did one stupid thing after another. I've always thought there was room for this sort of story to be true, amid all the hype and splendor of Helter Skelter.

Susan At. claims that the Helter Skelter story was a method for Charlie manipulating his followers into protecting him from the black guys that he feared. That he never really believed it, anymore than he believed any of his apocalypse stuff. Plus she thinks he liked the prosecution using it at trial because he knew it sounded too stupid and crazy to be believed. The fact that the jury bought it made him even crazier and in the part of the trial devoted to punishment Manson did everything he could to overturn that motive.

Anyway, she makes a good case for it. What she has to say reminds me of Elie Weisel's words about the banality of evil, speaking of the nazis. Charlie Manson is a clever guy by half. He was certainly charismatic, but he really didn't know what to do with it. And it turned out he wasn't a great musician, and he had no real hook, so he wasn't going to get famous.

Another thing I took away from the manuscript is the fact that many of these people were from broken and abused homes. They became dependent on Manson in subtle and obvious ways. He is a master manipulator and he still is, even in prison. When he dies he will have to face the terrible movie of his own truth. A kind of pain that cannot be imagined.

Here's the link: http://www.susanatkins.org/6-Myth.html

Now that Susan is dead she will have faced her own lies and come to grips with what she must account for with the whole of us. I believe she did as best she could to change who she had become. I'd love to hear Ed Sanders opinion of this material. He wrote the great Manson Family book, The Family: Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion. Worth reading if only for his over-the-top renderings of the fear that lay behind everything. Oo-ee-oo.

May these poor deluded souls find the Lady's mercy in their hearts.

Rogue, a Person Who Deceives, Swindles

2009-11-16T12:23:00.003-06:00

The title of this piece is from the online thesaurus site under synonyms for rogue. Going Rogue, Palin's book is out and she's already been called a liar by republicans and others. It makes no difference; she is sainted to her followers. Probably in the same way that Eva Peron came to be regarded in Argentina. It is worthy of noting that the Perons were fascists, and the governments they provided their people were all about power and money, despite being billed as populist.

There is a weird element of Goddess-worship lurking in the Palinistas. The image of the Madonna here, in a xtianist culture. Like Our Lady of Lourdes, or the Mexican Black Madonna. Somehow Sara P. is seen as both a mother and an object of desire. She's the other version of Madonna, the pop star. She is good at manipulating men with her sexuality, but she is not beautiful enough to have become a film star, or tv star. But now she is flirting with big time fame.

As far as politics goes, she is going to be limited by her ignorance and her clear intention not to do anything about it. If she did stay in politics she would be defeated, over and over again. And this would take off some of the lustre. She has no intention of doing that, of course. This book thing is clearly aimed at making some serious money off whatever has happened in her life before it all falls down around her. She is riding a train to gravyville and she knows, on some level, that she is never going to get the respect of the people who run things in this world. That means other governments, other republican leaders. She knows she isn't really good enough to do these things. But she really doesn't care about that.

For Sara P. its all about adulation and buckage. The more of these things, the better. She doesn't give a crap about the USA, about Alaska, about the people who support her even. She lives for petty reasons. She is essentially white trash america. That's a fairly racist thing to say, I believe. But I know there is a segment of the population that this describes. Those who love Sara see in her a woman they have loved in real life, mother, daughter, lover, sister. And since she's happily married and has a bunch of kids they assume she is without sin, virginal, yet MILFy. The perfect female for our culture. Sexually active, but pure as the Alaskan snow. Married to the First Dude, and equipped with the Partridge Family's bunch of kids, with silly american names like Pepper and Sneazy and Amber (yes, I know those aren't their real names and that I have a child who has the same name as one of Sara's).

I think it is really just a question of time for Sara to end up like Carrie Prejean, the California woman who blew off her Ms. California title by being above it all. Prejean's tapes of herself masturbating in front of a camera are now being circulated. Talk about your hypocrisy. Got to love them rightwing women. I believe there is plenty of dirt on Sara out there, too. And that it will all turn up in time. Her erstwhile son-in-law that wasn't, Levy (who is appearing in PLaygirl, Jonston and all) has said he has something way big on her and she'd better toe his line. And she was all nice about Levi in her Oprah interview. When told that, Levi said that Sara was smart. He had too much on her for her to mess with him.

Of course, if Levi turns up dead in a car wreck, or a drug overdose, I think we will all know the real story. If I were him I'd be pretty damn careful from now on.

But what's really going to happen is that Sara will fade, will be even more exposed as a loser, and end up with a rightwing talk show that will be an echo chamber for those who need one so desperately. She looks cute and she can be funny. And she mainly just wants to be rich. In thirty years she may end up on Hollywood Squares.

Or, the world may come apart and she be elected President of these United States. In that case, I will think that end times may actually have shown up.

But somehow, I don't think that is too likely. I will say, if it looks like Sara is going to be elected, it will be time to lay in some firearms and other supplies.

May the Lady enjoy this human joke and protect us with Her mercy.

Blog Change Statement

2009-11-09T13:23:00.005-06:00

I have taken my poetry blog out of the public forum. Few people bother with it, and those that do seem to be there not for the poetry. I do not intend to post poems that end up being scanned for salacious bits from thirty years ago.

To that end the blog, Homage & Apology, is now an invitation only blog. If you would like to be invited to this blog (and I really don't think you do), please let me know at tosburn@msn.com. Not only do you need me to have your email address, but Blogger requires a google login for this to work.

I apologize for this, but the only other choice was deleting the blog altogether. While that might be the better thing to do I found I could not quite bring myself to delete the more than 300 postings that exist there. Though I do have copies of them, printed out and stuck away in that morass of paper that is my files.

All that I do is meant to honor the Lady.

Our Lady of Perpetual Meddling

2009-11-04T11:31:00.002-06:00

Okay, I got the term from Mudflats, the Alaskan blogger. But it really does describe Sara the Bare-uh not the Michael Palin. Yesterday's election in NY 23 is another weird feather in that awful cap she is designing for 2012. A republican district since before the Civil War, Sarah and her friends Rusty Limbo and Dick not in the Armey, managed to finally elect a democrat there. The regular republican candidate was a woman, and she had an italian name (and we know Sarah doesn't like that) and she was a pro-choice middle of the road republican. So Sarah and her friends drove the woman out of the race and told the world to support this loser-idiot candidate from the hard right. He lost. The democrat won. Why? Because who in their right minds wants Sarah and company to run this country? You say they have real support? I say that when push comes to shove most americans want somebody who isn't crazy running things. Even though we don't trust them (pols), even though we hate to give any money to keep things running. At least, at the very heart of things, we know that Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office is pretty much the actual end of western civilization.

Our Lady of Perpetual Meddling. Gotta love that.

And there's her ongoing war with her erstwhile could've been son-in-law, Levi the young man with the prominent Johnston. He's doing a playgirl spread and they will sell the hell out of that magazine. He's a cute kid, redneck from Alaska. And he keeps speaking out about what the crazy lady is really like. Oh, if only the republicans will nominate her in 2012. But, even if they did that, she'd be sure to quit somewhere along the way. That is her way of being Sarah. I expect down the pipe we will see her on Hollywood Squares or something just like it. Famous long ago, to quote Ray Mungo.