Saturday, November 7, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Open Letter of Congratulations to our Noble, Honorable President, Barack Obama
My story is that I started writing again -- after a 9 year fallow period; mostly afraid to speak my mind politically while Bush was in power -- about a week or two after you were inaugurated. You have brought incredible joy back into my life and that of my wife's (I'm 59; she's 74 years old). I have written that the fact that you were elected, an authentic person, is an auspicious sign that "Something Wonderful is Going to Happen." You were too young, but with John Lennon and people like him of my generation, we felt that wonderful things could only happen. But then the moneyed interests changed what was taught in universities, changed what was allowed to be published in books, changed what the media would report, and changed what the history books would say -- having been witness to some of these events I am aware of how even our history has been shaped to suit the super-rich.
I had given up hope. You gave me back my hope. Don't let us down, Barack. I don't think you know how twisted are the brains of Republicans. Joe Biden and I come from the same part of the country, and he speaks plain talk. Listen to him tell it straight. But thanks for renewing my life and my wife's. We are fully in your corner, speaking out on many blogs and websites. This is wonderful that the world recognizes your heart and your steadiness. Please don't let the snakes snooker you. It's one thing to know of the audacity of hope and to look toward the light, but as your forefathers did when traveling the Underground Railroad, keep your ears and eyes to the back also to keep an eye on the dogs, the guns, and the wild eyes. They want you down. Please don't let them. Continue to stand tall and noble and following your divine inner wisdom as to the right thing to do for all the people. God will support you -- the good and loving one. But all but sad zombie americans will too; and that is at least two-thirds. With your example, you can even win over some of the crazies. Some. The world and America loves you when you speak and act authentically and righteously and do not give an inch to the filthy rich zombies who have stolen from this country and brought the world to its knees.
Indeed for my wife and me, they have taken all our money and our house. But we will be going around the country, traveling in our RV, and helping people suffering, and helping promote the causes that you and I both believe in. You know, I was a community organizer too. I, with a group of others, and with our mutual friend Peter deFazio, brought down nuclear power in this country by creating the largest bond default in history on the grounds that the people of the Northwest were going to be indebted to the tune of $8,000 per household because of the corruption by the rich in the WPPS scandal. But we beat them by finding democratic law on the books in Springfield, Oregon that did not allow public officials to in-debt their constituents over a certain amount without there being a vote. Since there was no vote, the court declared that the people of Springfield could not be charged with the exorbitant misdeeds of the mad investors. Not much different from what happened when you came into office, except the rich this time did get away with it. Please be strong. Democracy is not just an olive branch; it is a hammer against the thugs that would rob the people of a decent life. Remember your mother and her last days. That is not America. But then again, it is America now, even though the Western Civilized World would not have allowed such a thing as happened to your mother. We need to become noble again. The whole world is supporting you, this prize is an indication of that. Put the Republican crazies behind you just as Jesus said, "get thee behind me Satan."
You will have immense strength. Sathya Sai Baba will not let you fail. You must continue to speak out against this continual rising of wealth into the hands of the very few and this descent into Dickens' England for the 97% of the rest of us. God gave you all you need to keep the U.S. from becoming another Mexico, or some other third world country.
So, congratulations! You know the world is with you; please remember that an unusually high percentage of Americans are too. Do not be afraid to use your hammer. Remember presidents who were called "trust-busters" and of whom they said "Give 'em hell, Harry." You are that kind of President. Stay strong, be bold. We've got your back, my friend. I thank you for taking on this job. My wife prays for you; and my actions are my prayers to educate people to the correctness of what you do and the, well, idiocy and mean-spiritedness, of those that oppose you.
Take strength in the love of us millions, knowing that we are all One, and that you cannot fall without all of us falling.
Do the great things you are capable of. There are many of us now dedicating our lives and making the big push now, with you in office, as we have waited since November 23rd, 1963 for the lying times to end and for there to be the chance that Kennedy once opened our minds to see. That time is now. It is our time, It is your time to lead. You have been blessed with the skills....
and this time
this time,
we shall not fail
we shall not fail.
We SHALL overcome.
OK, now, Barack. Got Nobel Prize.
Got Nobel Prize. Ok.
Ok then.
Fired up?
Ready to go?
Fired up?
Ready to go?
Good then. Because we sure as hell are too.
Congratulations on this great honor.
Now be it like you know you can.
All the best.
Your friend,
Mickel Adzema, aka SillyMickel
at
www.primalspirit.com and about 20 other websites and blogs.
Inspired
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:08:04 -0400
To: mickel@primalspirit.com
From: democraticparty@democrats.org
Subject: Inspired
Untitled Document
Mary Lynn & Mickel -- "...I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it's also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action -- a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century." The news has left me deeply proud to be an American. So I want to congratulate President Obama, and give every American the opportunity to join me in saying "Congratulations, Mr. President." | ||
| ||
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Sunday, October 4, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
"Nations Need Therapy, Too: TRUTH - It is Just as Important for Society to Uncover Its Repressed Truth, in Order to Heal, as It is for the Individual"
WHY IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT WE HAVE A TRUTH COMMISSION
This started out as a commentary on the video I produced and published on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9filoR7cfk) last week titled "8 Years." Since then I was moved to write a commentary to accompany it, which I did when I added the video to my website www.primalspirit.com (http://www.primalspirit.com/decider-dictator.html) Writing the commentary I began to realize some important and overlooked truths concerning one of the issues that our government is facing right now. As Obama, Pelosi, Leahy, the Republicans, and all the media struggle over the issue of having a truth commission to look into possible illegalities committed by Bush-Cheney, I was flooded with one of those obvious truths, the common sense kind, that gets lost in the complexities of personalities and politics.
On one of my websites, Primal Spirit: Powerful Catalysts for Fundamental Growth of Self, Society, and Planet, we haven't yet had occasion to publish too much, some...not a lot, on the "powerful catalysts to society" part of the title . . . until now. For just as on the individual level, as in primal therapy, hidden TRUTH must be uncovered, faced, dealt with, and ONLY THEN put behind oneself; so also must society uncover its hidden truths or it will be sick. And by sick, I mean the same thing that Santayana meant when he said "A society that does not remember its history is doomed to repeat it." So far, nothing big there. Then it hit me: But if history is not known, how can one help but repeat it? In the current situation, if we DO NOT look into what was done by Bush-Cheney during the 8 years that, as my video points out, numerous scholars have determined was America's first dictatorship, then we will not have a TRUE history of what happened. And if our history is not true, then it is fantasy, speculation, or propaganda. In that situation, which is our current one, unless we have that truth commission, we "are doomed to repeat it." Repeat what? DICTATORSHIP. And the even sadder thing is that when we fail to learn from our past experience, whether as individuals or societies or nations, when it repeats, it repeats in a bigger form, carrying more impact, force, devastation…more dire consequences.
We have numerous historical examples of this pattern in recent history alone - on both sides. When Germany, South Africa, and Japan faced and dealt with the horribles of their recent past (after WWII for Germany and Japan; after the end of apartheid for South Africa), they went forward and prospered tremendously, even phenomenally.
Everyone quotes Santayana on history repeating. How then can no one seem to make the connection that your history has to be TRUE HISTORY not a web of lies hiding deep and festering wrongs. So it is just as important for nations and societies to uncover its repressed truth, in order to heal, as it is for the Individual
And just as on the individual level, if our nation -- specifically right now our government -- continues to deny,refuses to let our truth rise up to heal us, or simply, as Obama may end up doing, look the other way on the grounds that there are more important things to deal with, well then as a nation -- just as individuals, we are driven to continually re-enact our biggest mistakes over and over despite our best efforts not to -- so also on the level of the nation or society, we will fix a problem only to see it rise up again during the next election cycle.
In fact, it is exactly that lack of facing the truth that has led to the current global economic implosion, started here in the U.S. Reaganomics caused that; we are finally admitting on our talk shows. Yet we had 12 years of Reaganomics from 1981 through 1992. And during that time, we saw how effective it was: it not only almost quadrupled the national debt during the 12 years of Reagan and Bush, Sr., it not only severely unbalanced the budget, but it caused a recession so important that it led to Clinton winning the Presidency on the slogan "It's the economy, stupid!"
Despite the fact the Clinton reversed that downswing dramatically by REVERSING Reaganomics; and despite the fact that his policies helped create one of the most prosperous decades in recent history, even leaving a surplus for the next administration, not a peep was heard about the disastrous experiment Reaganomics turned out to be. Apparently our country was not about to call Reagan wrong at that time; too many idiots felt that somehow we had to treat him like a nice Grandad and not say anything unseemly, regardless of how the rest of the country would fare. I fear there were more insidious reasons than that for not broadcasting what we had learned, as such a cost.
And it was just that lack of truth-telling of the obvious, so as not to smear Reagan, though his economics was a horrible failure and it had been proven to be so, that allowed Bush to come in and go about doing Reagan's mistake, only doing it several powers greater and doing it sooner. Bush came in and gave the budget surplus to the wealthy, without a peep from any in the media or any outrage on the part of Americans, most of whom had suffered through the recession only a decade earlier.
But the average American would not know economics like the experts, the media, and the government. So it was tragic to refuse to point out that Bush's ideas had already been tried by Reagan and his father with horrible consequences. Everyone kept quiet and suppressed the knowledge of their own experience.
What happened? We "were doomed to repeat it," only karma seemed to have a part because we are not just repeating it. We are being punished severely with one of the worst economic downturns in America's history; and it seems to me we deserve it because obviously the lesser medicine did not teach Americans and their media and leaders a damn thing; but with this one; oh, well, NOW, we are hearing that trickle-down Reaganomics started it all. So if we are too stupid to learn from a mistake, that mistake will come back bigger and bigger until we wake up and realize that the path we are on is not working.
Now this is very important, why?
Because scholars have determined that in studying the actions of Bush-Cheney, America, for the first time in its history, went into a dictatorship, meaning that their policies, which involved tossing out the Constitution, and pillar-by-pillar removing the foundations of our rights, our freedoms, and our democracy, including even the right to have a vote that will be counted, or more specifically, will be counted in favor of the person you voted for, not counted toward the opponent. Consider that the ones with expertise in poring over all the documents and data have determined that we had a smokescreen of democracy and freedom talk, but that actually we were living in a dictatorship.
There are scholars galore putting out books delineating the ways in which our Executive Branch acted as literal traitors, and worse, to America, and list the grounds upon which Bush and Cheney would be tried for murder, for starters, if they were anyone else in America. ...
If these truths are not faced by our country, God help us. For just as voodoo economics returned, with results many, many times worse than the first time; well, what can we imagine would happen if we don't face the truth about the dictatorship of George W. Bush, the loss of rights and freedom and honest elections?
For one thing, consider how easily this dictator rose to power. Our supposed democracy didn't stop him, like it is assumed democracy will. If we don't take in that lesson, not only are we doomed to repeat these horrible eight years, but we are leaving a door wide open for the next one; and if you think you have to have concentration camps in order to see dictatorship, well, gee, just guess what you are going to get under the next American dictator.
And this will surely happen for it is simple common sense that anyone would understand if it were related to something in their commercial life. You don't see farmers feeding the wrong kind of grain to their livestock more than one time, do you; can you even imagine it? Than why would we think that we can ignore finding out what happened and fixing it in order to keep something worse than it from happening in the future when it comes to politics?
Is it that we think that as Americans we are immune from something so horrible? Then are we a nation of Pollyannas? And how many Katrinas, Iraqs, Vietnams, Bush-Cheneys, being rated at the bottom in health care among developed nations, having one of the shortest life expectancies among developed nations, having one of the worst educational systems, and having one of the lowest standards of livings among developed nations kinds of events is it going to take before people stop engaging in magical thinking, believing the things that pandering Republicans will tell them to hide these facts, instead of taking their truth from the experiences of their own lives?
I hope all Americans and our representatives will resist the tendency to run away from the unpleasant past and instead find ways, and there are plenty of easy ways, to turn and face the darkness behind us, so that we will not be forced to walk through an even blacker and more horrible darkness before us.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Message From Michael: What Michael Jackson's Life Teaches Us
Michael Jackson is sleeping with the angels, and our world is a little bit different, suddenly, with his unexpected departure. He'd been an icon in the global cultural panorama for four decades; he stood out as remarkable, literally, since he was a child singing hit songs on the radio with The Jackson Five. But his life came crashing down at the end, as if that cartoonish WWI fighter plane he "flew" in his video had started taking on more and more enemy fire, and unable to fend it all off, he was finally brought down. In his last half decade he was as intensely hated, maligned, mocked, and ridiculed, in some quarters, as he was intensely loved and admired in other quarters. Thus, he remained an icon, a household word, someone that was remarked about, yes, "remarkable."
So what kind of a message do people get from a life story such as that? With his iconic status, his life's message will go out to the world; the example of his life will be demonstrating something, revealing a part of our reality, teaching something to the world for a long time. Since he soared so high and crashed so hard, that message is likely to be mixed. For a long time his life was an inspiration, but in the end many may take the story as a warning: "Don't be too outstanding, too different, too remark-able," some might take from him, "for by soaring so far and away from the huddled masses, you are a visible and remarkably easy target. So keep your head low, your powder dry; move only in darkness, making wide berths around any spotlights; you'll live longer, you'll endure less pain and agony, and you're life is less likely to end tragically."
Is that the message we should take from Michael's life? If we do, I think that would be tragic. For I think we would be missing Michael Jackson's real message; we'd also not get what I believe Michael himself would wish to give us, as even in life he wanted to convey it. The message from Michael....?
Let's back up and refocus a second. We used to say in the Sixties, "You're either part of the problem or part of the solution." Think that harsh? It wasn't at all for us, it was actually quite grounding and clarifying in confusing times. I had occasion to pass that saying on to a younger friend of mine recently who basically was throwing up her hands over the environmental crisis and saying "I don't know whether to holler out loud or to shake my fist." Her point was an exasperated, what're you going to do about it?
So when I sensed that feeling, I tried to share that we felt like that once. We went up against a horrible waste of life that went on year after year, gobbling up young men who never had a chance to live, and countless Vietnamese, men, women, children; often dying horrible deaths burning alive or worse. It was unconscionable and yet we could do nothing to make it stop.
Well, you can give up when confronted with frustrating realities. But you don't have to. There is a kind of vision and grandeur, or something very right about that statement from the Sixties that dispelled our frustration and kept us moving forward with conviction about our direction. "You're either part of the problem or part of the solution." You see, no one can singlehandedly save the world. Yet, if we think about it, isn't that where the frustration comes from?
My friend thinking "What can any ONE possibly do about it?" is probably everyone's reaction to big problems. We're used to handling things individually. Even huge global wide problems like the current economic depression are dealt with, primarily, at the level of individual and family with each one having to find their own salvation, their own way of surviving -- navigating their isolated financial boats through the choppy economic seas. So we think that way out of habit. Yet there are problems that individuals, ON THEIR OWN, can have little or no effect on. So we think there's nothing we can do, and that whatever it is – a war, an environmental collapse, injustices committed by societies and nations – are part of the inevitable evil of the world that we must just accept.
But our habitual thinking has caused us to miss the hugely obvious, as it too often does. For when we set our single skin-bound selves up against overwhelmingly huge and omnipresent evils, we are wildly misperceiving the situation; we don't realize how far off we are because we're surrounded by everyone else doing the exact same kind of ego-centered tunnel thinking. For to be frustrated thinking, "What can I possibly do about it?" is missing the awareness of our consciousness as being indistinct from the sea of consciousness. When we wish to right a huge wrong, why do we always think we are the only ones who would want to?
The point is that we are not alone; we are even interconnected. And there is great power in the thoughts, wills, and intentions of many being in alignment. Union organizers and activists are ever so aware of this; it is the virtual Bible of social change that guides them: change is effected through "the power of numbers," meaning enough people being united in purpose can be strong enough to overcome the power of wealth, dominance, entrenched belief, and so on. But union organizers and social activists exist because people forget that and do the habitual thinking I mentioned that leads to paralysis and submission to the status quo; and their main job is to constantly remind people that they are not alone and that their actions, though small, are additive with uncountable, but unknowable, numbers of others.
The "unknowable" part is the root of the problem. For we can have faith in the efficacy of the actions we take regarding our individual concerns. But we cannot know the minds and intentions of every soul on this planet, so we easily lose faith. That is why we need to be reminded that we can only do our part, that we are not alone, and that it is as likely that there are huge or increasing numbers of actions being taken that are in line with ours as to think that there are few or none.
And THAT is what is clarifying and invigorating about that simple saying – part of the problem OR part of the solution. Stated that way, you no longer perceive your tiny frame against an overwhelming darkness, you begin to think of it as a 50-50 chance, you start thinking in terms of the mass of everyone and as their being only two choices for everyone. You realize that even people who aren't aware of what you're aware of are taking action on the issue and are weighing in on it, even if it is simply in their not-acting. Well, their non-action has an effect that may be part of the problem, but it could also be part of the solution. So with this perspective, you have a basis for faith, a basis for acting and not feeling that your actions are futile, for you cannot know the numbers of others that are acting in concert with you, and cannot have an inkling of the possibility of success. BUT, that unknown could just as easily be hugely in line with you, either now or some time in the future, as not.
Now, that is what is comforting about being part of the solution. You never will know until the future that maybe there are millions or billions of others thinking and taking action in the same direction in which case your small part is quite enough to change the world. And if it doesn't work out that way, you at least have a clear conscience that whatever happens, it wasn't lost because you stood in the way, or on the sidelines.
Now what does this have to do with Michael Jackson?
Well, it is easy to look at his life and, regardless of all his success, say that well, he died too young, he maybe was too wacky or crazy or out there so that he became a target and in the end, just like John Lennon, and others who were persecuted for standing out or speaking up, he paid with his life.
It should be clear that the persecution, the fiasco around the trial in 2004, clearly took it out of him, as others said, and it diminished his life.
At the time, I actually wrote a kind of defense of Michael not so much on the grounds of knowing anything about his guilt or innocence, but mostly on the grounds of the idiocy of the roots of the claims against him. The things touted in the media had all the trappings of a witch hunt or a scapegoating. They demonstrated nothing bad about Michael and said lots more about the people making the charges.
I say all this as a trained therapist, with many decades of experience observing people, their defenses, the feelings and trauma that they are hiding beneath them, and the way they act them out when they are not accessed. Michael's attacks had all the characteristics of the kind of attacks that have been hurled against all sensitive men going back to Jesus.
Michael was sensitive and loving and innocent, and I point out how that is what did him in in a world where people are not, and they cannot understand that anyone could possibly be not like themselves, which means having secret desires, hidden agendas, constantly searching for the right word to advance or at least not hurt their prospects, and so on. In a world of wolves, Michael hurt no one, so he was a prime target to be the sacrificial lamb.
But Michael had two strikes against him. Ironically, in America, the supposed land of the free, which the right-wing is constantly bannering, especially his second "crime" should have been applauded. But that is the hypocrisy of the right-wing -- espouse freedom, but you better not be too different from everyone else or you're gonna be mighty suspicious and we're gonna have to keep a watch on you.
The same thing happened with the counter-culture. That had to be crushed because corporations cannot make money if people go around being free, being unique, authentic, or individuals. God makes humans as different as snowflakes, thereby expressing the beauty of superb harmony of a universe with infinite complexity.
Right-wingers use free spirits, individuals, like Jesus, to beat out the individualism in others. No, it doesn't make sense; but then talk to them sometimes and you tell me if you ever hear anything that is a rational sequence of thoughts lasting for more than a few seconds, if that.
So Michael's crime was in doing what God and even America would espouse: be an individual, carve out your unique destiny, succeed by finding that thing in you that God gave you making you like no other, and express it to the world. And now it occurs to me that there was a third thing that made him a target to be hated, that I didn't put in the article. You see, Michael succeeded in exactly that way -- that way that our religious and our American values say is ideal for a human. But in a culture that is full of unhappy people, particularly men, who have given up their ideals to become zombies in the corporate machine, and have rationalized that they had no choice…. Well, Michael is the stick in the eye, the poke in the face, the constant bee sting reminding them that they just might have sold out, they just might have given up too soon, they just might have been happy, and they just might have wasted their lives.
And worse still, in their unconscious, these macho, zombie robots of the corporate culture, are thinking like "Michael Jackson...how can such a weak, effeminate "pussy" like him succeed but not strong, blah, blah, blah, me; and blah blah blah."
But they are too weak themselves, actually, to be able to live with that, so they can't let themselves even think that. So Michael Jackson has to die. When he's out of sight, or punished severely proving that "we" were right to choose the path "we" took -- so their subliminal chatter goes -- well then, we'll be reassured that these are the only choices men really have in life.
So its possible most folks' reaction to Michael Jackson's story might be, then you better watch out and you better not show your sensitive side. Really? Then Michael's life example was for nothing.
Well, I don't agree. Certainly, there is only one Michael; and he was unique in so many ways that made him stand out – his talent, his softness, his childlikeness. And the thing that made him great was that he let himself be all that he was; he did not say "Oh, that wouldn't be accepted, or how would that look?"
And that is the example, the message we can take from Michael's life. If you turn away, you will miss getting the legacy he left us all; showing us that being the unique you, the only one like you in the Universe, with all that you have, is the greatest thing that you can do, and means you end up giving the most that you can possibly give to others. Some people mistakenly think that it is egotistic or selfish to be yourself. No, actually it takes a lot of courage to be who you are and to become someone who actually can MAKE a difference in other's lives. Michael worked damn hard to perfect his talent; and he shared it and made the world happier and more loving. How can that be considered selfish? It was lots of work and guts. And he even had to take the consequences for daring to be himself, and giving so much to others, for it inevitably made others -- others who sold out, and who were more selfish, less hard-working, or should I say, less caring of others and wanting to share their love with them and make a difference in their lives -- hound him mercilessly out of this world.
Michael gave us an example, like Barack Obama does today as well, of an authentic person. It is indeed our strongest natural desire to be authentic, to be real. It is that for which we live this life on Earth. Our strongest and deepest desire is to live lives of richness, truth, and love. Call this authentic, natural, or primal, it is the same, and it implies also simplicity, the wise innocence of the child, the innocent wisdom of the experienced, humility, and respect and unity for Earth species everywhere. In every culture these are all aspects of the authentic person, the noble soul, the real person, or simply put, the Human.
But it ain't easy. For just as Dylan sang "I try my very best, to be just who I am; when everybody wants me to be just like them," it's true that the great majority of people are sick people, so sick, so insecure, and so needy that they cannot see you for the incredible person that you are, nor can they see the incredible person that they are. Their souls have been stolen, usually in childhood, and they spend their lives trying to live up to the demands and shoulds of "ghostly" others – people from childhood who more than likely for most of their lives won't be there. Yet they'll hear their voices and fear their wrath, their hand, strap, stick, or worse. So it is sad for them, but sad for us too, for they only feel better when they feel you are like them, and then their lives are somehow OK; which is the lie that they are trying to maintain because in fact their lives are not OK, and it would be better they realized that and got help for it.
But for those who can make the effort, the rewards are worth all the work. For essential to having lives of richness, truth, and love is the quest to be the person that divinity intended in creating the unique you whose life is holy and sacred the more we can be and express that "chord," that "energy," that divine spark that you and you alone can contribute to the world.
Failing this, the world does not receive the gift that is part of Divine Perfection. Wanting this, one finds that one has been burdened and warped in the muddled process of growing up in a culture and world that is estranged from its primal, authentic underpinnings (moorings).
Thus, we require the desire for authenticity and the willingness to seek it, to reach out for help in growing towards it, and divine guidance and support. The last part is the only part that is guaranteed. Unfortunately, though guaranteed, it is useless to the great masses of people who can't receive it or feel its beneficence and its blessing. Because, as we will say again and again, we are grown and taught and everywhere and at all times heavily impressed into a trance-like hypnotic belief system, which, sadly , drill out of us and even our memories, any of the natural feelings of faith, belief in oneself, courage to be an individual, and rightness and beauty of being authentic and true. So should we awaken to the quest for authenticity, it is usually brought out only after much suffering from that burden of twisted, unreal perception.
People suffer long and excruciatingly, hanging on to the untruths that came from without, for truly the culture has you in a trap: you both suffer from the beliefs it has fed you, yet waking up and striving for authenticity is seen as having to be even worse, in that there is little support for it, and often, one must travel alone, even ostracized for daring such a path. Having forced this Matrix-like total view that blocks out any perception, or even feeling of what is really real, into us, the culture then also punishes harshly those who would dare to struggle with the bonds that enslave them. And small hope there is for them having been robbed of the natural born feelings of faith in a living omnipresence that is real, and true, and most importantly, strong and powerful beyond imagining, steadfast, ever and always present, and available just for the asking.
The message from Michael, however, makes us aware of healing and clarity of consciousness greater than one would think possible. His life was a message of inspiration to openness to feeling, but also strength of body. We remember his astonishing dancing, his phenomenal physical presence on stage, at his peak, reminds us to build a mind-body foundation that will be motivated and hopeful, and thus feel important enough and courageous and brave enough to dare to seek for the highest attainments of life. Physical health and a deep feeling of grounding in a fit, effective body is the basis for everything else: confidence comes; with confidence we aspire for the true ends of life -- richness of experience, authenticity of being and feeling, expansion of feeling into greater and greater love and unity, taking us beyond what we thought was possible as a human and opening our eyes to the divinity that is all around and in us and is our birthright. And ultimately, a life whose end is liberation, final and complete.
It's very common and popular for one to be advised, as if it could just be chosen, "Be yourself." or "Just be yourself." I think it's time to say that, however true that direction, if it were simply that easy, a mere matter of choice, then billions of people for hundreds of thousands of years would not have struggled so mightily for just that divine authentic richness of life, and often feeling they'd failed in the attempt.
Likewise, so much human endeavor would not have been expended to discover the secrets to regaining one's primal, childlike innocence and natural consciousness. Nor would grand religions be founded upon the words of teachers who stirred that quest and through example especially, catalyzed authentic and rich lives in many. Great individuals' lives show the way, the way so simple in its naturalness, its "inner wiring," so to speak. Yet so difficult to actually believe in, as always and everywhere culture, which requires of its members more of being like everyone else and doing for the group at large much that is not true to oneself, in fact, requires the suppression of that uniqueness.
Divine Perfection creates each person unique and perfect as a snowflake and with a purpose and reason for living that, if lived, is attuned with all that is good and better. But those perfect seeds are strewn into cultures, which are the accumulated encrustations of uncountable lives lived primarily in fear and suffering. Therein God's perfect creations must seek to find nurture and root, and to thrive wondrously, while influenced all about to do anything but that.
So culture, however seemingly rich, has at its base two functions. One is that of creating new cultural members burdened with the exact same kinds of fears and distortions of pure natural divinity as the other members. Cultures create such burdened adults who have been violently separated from their true source within. It remains untainted and perfect, however buried, waiting to be remembered; for while it is our source, our root, it is also our goal, our fruition.
Cultures second function, having stolen our true life source, our meaning for living, and our goal, is to fool us by replacing that stolen richness with a fake. After the harsh processing individuals endure, which begins even at birth in the brutal and unnatural way cultures have contrived to welcome its newcomers, many individuals would waste away from despair and misery, or simply not thrive (though some do, right at the start, so there's crib deaths). Its second function is about providing, through the efforts of all those terrified predecessors, the contrivances, tricks, rituals, and hocus-pocus to serve, unfortunately not healing or relief, but rather a kind of dimming of consciousness and awareness of what one has lost, and a hypnotic commonly maintained and relentless drumming and forcing into belief the Big Lie of life, that one is happy and content, in the bosom of culture, no matter how one actually feels.
As Kurt Cobain put it graphically and with shocking clarity, "he'll put you in a jar . . . And you'll think you're happy … he'll cover it with grass … and you'll think you're happy . . . And if you save yourself, he'll give you breathing holes … and you'll think you're happy…. But You're really in a laundry room, you're really in a laundry room, the feelings that you feigned to use….
But Michael left his example; he left his gift to us that it can be done, that one can throw off the shackles, the diminishment of self, the disempowering weight of the cultural mold and be free…free to soar, free to create what no one ever has, free to be like no one ever has been, free to think, to give, to love...to envision a better world, a better culture, to live it, be an example of it, and to seek to create it and to share it. And for those who shun his message in light of the price he paid, one has to ask oneself whether it is the length of one's life or the life of one's life that is important. Michael Jackson had no doubts on that one; he wrote "We Are the World," giving words to the truth he knew. He lived life large and inspired us to embrace our greatness also. The world is different and better because of his time here. What more could one ask of one person's life?
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Culture War, Beginnings: Trauma at the Top: “Our Youth Have Gone Crazy! They Actually Believe That Claptrap About Freedom That We Put in Schoolbooks To Keep the Masses Complacent! They’re Daring to Use Them!”
TALKIN' 'BOUT MY GENERATION
Whatever Happened?
Whatever happened to Sixties youth? What has become of the values, aspirations, ideals, and energy that manifested in those turbulent but exciting, angry but supremely hopeful years?
There was a time, after all, when the influence of the "baby-boomer" youth generation was everywhere to be found. Their activities were broadcast daily on the TV news; they were making political events; they were setting trends in fashion and style which business did its worst to copy, package, and sell -- attempting thereby to cash in on such powerful enthusiasms.
Suddenly, faster than their appearance, this generation of youth faded from significance in the early Seventies. At the time, commentators were falling over each other attempting to fit a rationale to the relative disappearance of youth influence and the comparative placidity of events. A common explanation that surfaced in those days was that many youth leaders, particularly activists, had begun being disillusioned about the effectiveness and results of confrontational politics. Some argued that activists were beginning to "look inward" for the roots of problems, or of reevaluating and seeking to come up with better ways of eliciting change.
As for the less activist sectors of the youth culture -- those referred to by the originally pejorative terms "flower children" or "hippies" -- many had moved out of the cities, often in disgust and equal disillusionment, to the countryside. There they were reputed {or reported -- PM; check definition of "repute"} to be actively carrying out their "back to nature" values singly, in couples, and in communal groups; but as far as the larger culture was concerned, they were invisible.
Others have asserted that the media played a large and active part in the "disappearance" of this generation. It has been noted, for example, as simply one indicator, that 90% of youth protests were reported by the media in 1969, but only 20 to 25% were covered in 1970-71, and only 1% of such dissident activities could be found in the media coverage of 1972.
One could argue in response to this that demonstrations were becoming more commonplace, so they qualified less as news as time went by. But this reasoning does not fully explain the precipitous nature of this decline, nor the resulting virtual elimination of coverage. In respect to comparable events of recent times, such a pattern has elicited {"garnered" means more like to accumulate or gather or deposit; but it also means to earn; therefore stick with elicit for now} the label "media cover-up."
It is therefore much more likely -- and there has been evidence and published commentary to this effect -- that this decline was part of a concerted effort by the media, in collusion with the threatened established sectors of society, to actively put a lid on student and youthful dissent and unrest.
I myself have knowledge and personal experience of how a similar suppression at exactly this time was perpetrated on university campuses. Specifically, at the college I was attending -- Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania -- and other colleges and universities around the country, wealthy alumni threatened to withdraw funding unless (1) certain faculty members, considered "threatening" to established interests, were fired, (2) certain programs -- considered too innovative, "disruptive," or "instigative" -- were cut back or eliminated, and (3) certain "unorthodox," "undisciplined," or "publicly disrespectful" student behaviors were discouraged, suppressed, and/or harshly responded to and clamped down on.
Indeed, such active "blacklisting" of counterculture figures, behavior, and values on university campuses seemed to be part of a general dictum across institutions -- including publishing, films, TV, education at all levels, medicine and science, and the work place -- to actively fight back at what was seen as dire threats to traditional mainstream values.
Some commentators speculated that established societal powers had been caught off guard by the initial fervor and tenacity of counterculture energy and demonstrations, but that toward the end of the Sixties and early Seventies there had been time to regroup. These established forces and economic interests began to implement a well-conceived, hugely funded, well-orchestrated, and highly cooperative counteroffensive against the new cultural values, which in their minds represented a dagger poised at the heart of their very existence.
From this perspective, then, the media's active refusal to cover events could be seen as a small, albeit influential, aspect of a much larger effort (however unconsciously carried out) at suppression of the new values and reinforcement of traditional ones by the powerful interests that those values, if successful, either directly or indirectly put in jeopardy.
With these considerations, it is understandable that in 1971 and 1972 -- despite increasing unrest and demonstrations on college campuses, increasing liberalization of values among all age groups and growing liberal and counterculture political power -- there would be a number of books published and widely reviewed which, closing their eyes on all this, instead presented dubious evidence and selectively chosen incidents to make a case for a so-called "conservative backlash," which there is no doubt the authors earnestly hoped for and fervently sought to bring about in their proclamation of it.
This may be seen as the beginnings of the use of "The Big Lie" as a major, sometimes the only strategy, in conservatives attempts to fight back against this outpouring of sensitivity to injustice at all levels.
As background: The Big Lie basically amounts to the idea that you can say the most outlandish thing long enough, loud enough, and from the highest pulpit, and eventually it becomes accepted fact. No doubt, its use can be traced to the earliest times of civilized history and is certainly evident in this century in the tactics of Hitler and Mussolini, where it played crucial and primary roles.
However, its more recent re-emergence in contemporary America and its rise to the heights of skillful political brandishment in the hands, first, of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr., and then later to its most pervasive use, however awkwardly and skill-less, during the eight years of Georg W. Bush, where Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, and others took it to such moronic lengths they eventually were seen to be what they were -- big lies, with no attempt to educate the public at all; but simply to cover up and to manipulate, like common criminals would. (Note, that the results of this are discussed, with a fair amount of humor, in the next article "Naked Republicans.")
Nevertheless, these later major uses, in fact the evolution of The Big Lie into the ONLY strategy of Republican politics may find its beginnings in such publications as these books from the early 70s, as well as to its highly skilled, and much documented, use by Richard Nixon throughout his political career.
The success of The Big Lie; and its eventual morphing into the The Big Web of Deceit, more easily termed The Matrix. Whereas the 60s youth had only their enthusiasm and their heartfelt passion to allow a world of freedom, and all the other values espoused in our Constitution, they were up against huge entrenched, and filthy with wealth, nameless puppeteers. Their wealth got them any support they wanted for anything. And sensing a threat to the established quo, hearing about idealistic notions of equality, freedom, and such -- knowing that their positions depended not on the actual enjoyment of the masses of their supposed "freedoms" but only their being convinced that they had them.
So it was a huge threat to see masses of people proclaiming their rights and actually daring to use them. They could be slowed down in using their rights by having them violently bludgeoned by police and riled up construction workers in Chicago; they could be taken off track perhaps, by having several of them killed at Kent State; and they could be continually arranged to be misreported in the media and maligned as well. But this seemed to make them only more determined.
Still, these puppeteers owned the media and therefore controlled what the public would be told; they were the main sources of income for universities across the country, so they controlled what would be rolled out as truth and knowledge; and ultimately they could fund politicians and speakers, and radio and TV show hosts who would speak their Big Lies. So they really had all the weapons to roundly put down this band of idealists whose only weapons were truth, and righteous feeling, and passion of youth, and clarity of youthful mind.
So it was no contest, especially as only one side was fully aware that they were at war; indeed the other side -- most of them -- having no inkling of the powers behind the scenes (that would of course be left out of the history and sociology books they had read -- funded by the puppeteers of course). So, many of them even began to believe that they had lost, and that most Americans were lashing back at them. This would be disheartening to many; especially to those who had seen the coming together of middle class, upper middle class, and working class to join in mass movements like the one million who showed up from all over the country to be at Moratorium Day in November 15, 1970.
So, believing the media probably had a big influence on taking the wind out of the sails of many of the youth. And still others, feeling they must be wrong because they had now, according to the media, become the enemy to those they hoped would see the wisdom of these values that basically came from them! Their response, unfortunately, was to try to reintegrate with the society they had thrown behind them, but now saw as the only one possible.
Next: How The Big Lie Continues; the "Me Generation" created by the Puppeteers serves dual purpose in roundly being equated with Sixties youth, wrongly, and thus is given as evidence that their ideals were hypocritical.
Friday, May 15, 2009
“Message in a Bottle: A Message Arrives from Nine Years in the Past Predicting Today's Events” by SillyMickel Adzema
We are disturbed reading that nine years ago our present National Situation was foreseen. Worse, we are reminded of what we lost; what could have been; how we've managed to block that from our memory in accepting the much diminished prospects now; but also how we should not forget; how we should remember how it happened; who was to blame; who helped and colluded in bringing it about, and why; so that, remembering, we might never let it happen again. For we learn, worst of all, that our chance to progress, rather, just to survive, now depends on remembering. Because nine years ago all that's happened since could easily have been prevented if only we had not allowed ourselves to be talked into forgetting the history of only eight years prior to that. This is a serious and thoughtful piece, which everyone would do well to know, if we are to survive another 50 years, not to mention a century or longer. Still, the author is not of the sort that facing the harsh realities means we need go around glumly, martyr-like, in sack-cloth and ashes. Rather, the author feels we might as well enjoy and make use of all the God-given abilities we have whatever the outcome of our efforts. So don't be surprised that this exposition is aided by guest appearances making their points in hilarious fashion. If you've never heard George Bush as Blutto from Animal House, you've got to. Wolf Blitzer is not recognized for being a comic, but when he goes on to explain to his faithful viewers how they've been lied to and manipulated for years, because of pressure from the Administration, and how grateful he is for their gullibility as he is receiving promotions and honors because his viewership is polling the highest in mindlessly accepting the concocted view, well we see many new sides of Wolf. Thought-provoking but funny, another thing he explains is that their incredible success over the years in getting people to believe and or to forget whatever they want, has resulted in their having a little celebration consisting of an experiment as well (which they hope will bring them in even tighter with the now all-powerful Administration). The celebration-experiment consists of a documentary in which the entire truth of the multiyear campaign to lie, deceive, and to control minds is laid out. And the experiment part is that they are certain that the next day and ever afterwards when such thing ever being aired is denied, the people will completely forget it and believe they must have been mistaken. Wolf signs off: "One last reminder on our special tonight, the documentary, "Freedom of the Press, Repealed. The Story and How, this Repeal Now Thoroughly Institutionalized Over six Years, We Can Now Reveal How We've Duped You and Will Continue To." Tune in, don't miss it; You're sure to forget it."
I recently unearthed, March 9, 2009, 9:49am, three never finished drafts of an article I intended to publish on my website prior to the 2000 Presidential election. Stuffed and interwoven among the electrons of the backups of old computers, I had completely forgotten ever having written any of it. Engulfed, indeed, pushed around and battered within the intensity and sharpness of recent political, geopolitical, and economic and financial forces, I was shocked to see the words, written almost a decade earlier, which, desperately intoning, warned of specific dire happenings should George W. Bush be elected. For it seemed those exact words, of so long ago, had just been lifted from the headlines and front pages of today's daily news.
I read my words of nine years ago, e.g.
"I believe we are in grave danger of losing, not just an election, not just a Supreme Court, not just our environment, not just our good economy, not just our recent relative peace in the world but things far worse than those horrors. I believe we are in danger of losing all hope of maintaining, let alone progressing, in the freedoms and privileges that we take for granted."
Prophetic? Eerie? I don't know quite what to make of it. Reading more, this popped to attention:
"So is this election important? I believe it is. For me it is especially important, for I feel that if the Republicans take over, they will do so much damage to the dreams of my generation that even if the Democrats were to be reelected to all branches of government in 4 or 8 years, they will do so much damage (the example of Reagan-Bush nearly QUADRUPLING the National Debt in their mere 12 years being the perfect example) that My Generation will have to clean up their mess afterwards, taking more years. And only then will we be in a position to progress in this country and world and bring it more in line with the ideals of peace, love, community, and harmony we envisioned in the Sixties."
Having foreseen it, I couldn't have felt more helpless, knowing that America's, indeed, the world's, prospects for regaining a financial footing, whereas a mere nine years ago looked like liftoff, now was predicted as decades off, and that just to regain an ordinariness of life, with some saying that Americans will never again, ever, enjoy the standard of living they once took for granted.
It certainly disturbed me and got me to wondering, and then to writing.
It saddens me what could have been. Reading it, I am stunned by how we've managed to vanquish from our minds and our media the insane, chaotic, and truly awful outlines of our times, as the events of the last nine years crept daily into our lives and world and shaped them and it in drastic ways that we can discern only by the contrast. These unpolished catscans of a mind and time provide such a contrast, stark and shocking.
I have much to say, much have I remembered, and much have I reviewed in my mind, observing the timeline of these events, and the changes in the social and cultural and in people themselves as these events happened, one following another, changing us all. I will make myself clearer following the piece itself.
But before either, I wish for you to consider how I felt, what went through me, and to take on a little journey, a little reverie, that may provide a glimpse ahead, perhaps an understanding of the unbelievable, as a journey through the looking glass can often do:
A writer's words of nine years ago come back to haunt, sadden, provoke, enlighten, and motivate. How would you feel if you found out for sure that you foresaw, in an eerily accurate way, the events that would transpire over the last nine years before they happened? Sometimes we all have a sense of what the future is likely to bring forth. Everyone, in fact, has some working model of the future. But, be honest, and you'll probably acknowledge that those models of the future are almost always some kind of continuation of the present and the recent past, perhaps with a few technological advances thrown in. And usually, being the hopeful optimists we must be in order to continue our daily efforts, we envision something that is at least somewhat of a progression, something a little better, at least.
But what if you foresaw an exact reversal of the current trends, including an economic debacle, recession, market crash, nine years before it happened and even that it would happen about that time? You could think yourself prophetic. It could pump up your ego. However, if you also knew that you did not pick those predictions out of the air but that you had lived through a similar period in the past, and if you also had had decades of experience intensively witnessing the revelations of the deepest patterns of individuals' minds (as a facilitator in a deep-feelings therapy), all kinds of minds, so that you knew something about what really moved people; and you added to that your own multi-decade exploration of your own mind and motivations and feelings lying deeper and deeper all the way to the roots of your beings, so that you had a pretty comprehensive view of what caused you to be who you were; and along with this understanding of others and yourself you had also been an avid observer, and participant, of the social and cultural events and movements over the decades, going back to the fifties. Well, then you might attribute it to being an astute but quite expected conclusion arising from the visible evidence of the times.
But then you are no important person, pundit, or professional prognosticator. You have written and achieved moderate success as a voice in your field, and you had begun receiving invitations to write or be interviewed for other publications. But your social, political, and cultural commentary had been met with silence, even among those who followed your writings on the mind, its origins and its changes over millennia, and the current context and how it might be affected, and even attributed superlatives to your insights that you knew better than to just notice and put behind you. No, just silence, the masses have not come "scrambling to your door," nor have you been offered any jobs, or even invited to write on such topics elsewhere. You expect that you are not unusual in your perceptions, and any contrary thought is met with the fact that there has been dead silent response to your ideas; you feel that many people have similar predictions inside themselves.
But then, these events unfold over the years, as you predicted. And, without exception, the experts, the paid prognosticators, the pundits -- all of them -- to a person -- bemoan wearily the complete inability of anyone to have foreseen any of what transpired. And, to a person, they talk as if these things came completely out of nowhere, a freakish weather pattern or an act of God -- falling to Earth like the chunks of chemicalized frozen icebombs of jetliner rest room waste; or the lightning bolts out of some dark Mysterium Tremendum hovering high in the sky above us -- but in no way having roots in any previous events.
These people, these commentators on events who you see nightly, and whose every word is broadcast into the minds of multimultimillions and then often repeated again, or more than once, but then also echoed far and wide in venues and by people of all kinds and in all countries afterwards, these people with such immeasurable power to reach and influence the minds of a global populace, well, they also went through the same events as you, as proven by their age. Yet they also do not ever mention the times before that were so similar as to cause you -- nine years earlier to make what seemed the obvious conclusions you made. And now, even in retrospect, those obvious near exact patterns of events of the not so long ago, are not mentioned by them! Instead an attitude of "we're just human, and nobody could have known" predominates.
Well, this would cause you to ponder, would it not? How could so many people -- people whose job it is to do so -- not connect the obvious dots that you and others did nine years ago and now even in retrospect they are unable to?
Some of the possibilities could be that the people who are speaking for everyone have not risen to their levels on their abilities but that something else is behind their being seated in such powerful positions to speak and shape the thoughts of the multimillions. You might also ponder, then, if better, more astute prognosticators and analysts were being kept out of the positions of influence intentionally.
What it would come down to is asking yourself: Are you somehow the only one who is capable of making obvious predictions from the recent past (which might make you feel really good if you had some problem in your life where you had been made to doubt your abilities; but which if you continued to think that way, would have you living in a world of your own that did not have any ties to reality)? Or, if humble and astute enough and not so desperately needy of a pleasant thought about oneself, you would need to ask yourself and consider more seriously the prospect that the media reaction could very well be an unexpected part of the original prediction.
Given thought now, consider: If one had predicted an erosion of basic rights, and that had come to pass, why would not freedom of speech and of the press have been part of that erosion? Thinking more deeply, would it not have been a necessary part of the erosion of all the rest? For if the press had been doing its job would it not have been acting as protectors of our rights in decrying any assaults, proclaiming all intrusions, documenting all erosions, and so on, in the uncountable ways that it has done in the past?
Would that not have been a second "2" which combined with the other
"2" then makes total sense out of the "4" you're observing and trying to understand?
But as usually happens, when stumbling on the hidden but obvious, other, sometimes laughably obvious correlates come to mind: If Freedom of Speech and of the Press had been part of the erosion in human rights -- the rights laid out by our Bill of Rights -- well, who would be researching, detailing, proclaiming, or making documentaries about it? The Press? HA!
Well, of course, you think, sarcastically. Surely they would have done lots of things, for example, one of them would no doubt have gone like this:
"This is Wolf Blitzer. Tonight, tune in as CLN details the way we, and the rest of the mass media, have been slowly but relentlessly pressured and bullied into presenting the views of the party in power, the Republicans; how we have learned it to be in our interests, if we were to continue unobstructed, to eliminate more and more of the voices contrary to those in power. You will hear how we learned techniques of deception of our own so that we could seem to be presenting a range of views but how we could easily get the viewer to conclude that the party pressuring us was the most credible. How?
Tune in and learn how we matched the words of sophisticated and savvy talking heads from the administration against the least informed and least polished of those on the opposition, and how we managed a game, which we termed, keep-out-the-insightful, of politely putting off, through excuses of saying we were focusing on areas not in their realm at the present, and a multitude of such ploys, as years went by and they began to doubt their currency and thus doubted themselves and no longer sought to air their views in any but much smaller venues.
Tune in to see how mass media like ourselves were able, because of our collectively acting in the same way, having been pressured toward the exact same ends by the one power in America currently, the Republicans and the "filthy rich" owners of our corporations -- being essentially one and the same with one being the public and the other the private faces of the same group -- were able to cast doubt into the minds of seasoned intelligent and astute analysts as to their worth and currency and that of their ideas in the current era, making them feel that their time had come and gone and that personally they were has-beens, as at the same time we recruited the least able and the most naïve to take their places.
Other ploys: See how we kept media favorites who opposed the administration and who were astute observers and witty, articulate communicators for their side, on the dole and were even able to reap the profits of their appearances but how we slyly undermined their positions in myriad sly ways, using known effects of time of day scheduling, competition in particular time slots, sequencing of segments within shows, and of the shows themselves in the lineup, all in ways to discredit and garner the least audience for these voices.
So, see how we maintained our position and survived an assault on the Press, by caving in to the dictatorial demands of a Party that also essentially owned us, surreptitiously of course, but how we managed to the fool the public that we had in any way done so; how we managed at times to fool the public that we were their adversaries for truth and a counterbalance, as the Fourth Estate traditionally had been, to the powers of government and wealth, while in fact we were totally their tools in concocting the realities we were told to and muddying or ignoring the truths that came our way that would have been illuminating to the public presented fairly, but would have undermined the position we were pressured to present.
So, tonight, our special documentary, "Freedom of the Press, Repealed. The Story, and How -- This Repeal Now Thoroughly Institutionalized Over Six Years -- We Can Reveal How We've Duped You and Will Continue To."
Be sure to tune in or TiVo it. For it is just a little fun we are allowing ourselves -- that of spilling the beans about what is really behind the things we bring to you as actual events and true analysis -- as a kind of celebration of the thoroughness of our success, and as a proof to the administration at how thoroughly we have manipulated your thinking that we can dare to lay it all out and feel certain that it will fail to enlighten a single one of you, in fact we feel it will aid us in an aspect of our campaign -- that of keeping you confused so that you will be dependent on us for your conclusions. Especially when tomorrow evening and from now on, there will be no mention that this documentary ever existed, it will be expunged from all lists and archives and thoroughly be extracted and destroyed, as if it never existed. And we will begin a comprehensive campaign to add to our success in confusing and then convincing the public of the administration's version of events, and to add to our favor with the now sole power in America, by a calculated effort that we have designed that we think will be very successful and that you will enjoy, of the slow elimination, first, of American's collective memory of its past, beginning with the most recent and then, hopefully if successful and of course with your help, will continue further into the past; and following right behind the elimination of memory -- no, we're not going to tell you exactly how, now that wouldn't be very game-spirited of us would it; although, no one but you and I here now, I'll give you a hint -- confusion, for one, has been found to be extremely powerful in clouding out the details of memory -- now, that's all I'm gonna say, and believe me, if I wasn't so totally convinced that we have been so successful that we can tell you just about anything and get away with it, then I wouldn't have even said that. But of course, I am. That's why people like me still have these jobs, while -- gad, for a second there I almost said, my god just like it were the old days, I almost said, while "you may have noticed the losses and demotions of many formerly household names here at CLN who haven't been as cooperative, supportive, committed, or as convinced, as I certainly am, of our ability to totally manipulate your thinking, as we wish.
And, ha, ha, I have to say I have my viewership to thank for that. Sincerely, I owe a great debt of gratitude to you folks who regularly tune in to my show in particular. Why, the absolute malarkey that I was putting out to you, slowly at first, not feeling totally convinced of your gullibility, I mean, still in those days it was pretty irrational and unbelievable bull droppings, completely concocted out of only the hot air emanating from egotistical rants of those whose sole desire is only to comfort and enslave you.
Yet, the pollings that came in showed that I could practically fart out these concoctions and you would swallow them whole like tasty confections! I truly began to feel that I was like Moses bringing nightly the stone tablets; such was the utter inability among the masses of you to evaluate in any way what you were being fed.
My colleagues say that my success is my beard and frizzy hair -- part patriarchal, paternal, Moses-like, as well as appealing to My Generation base of long hairs and facial hair valuing; to which we added my supposed background as a member of a Sixties band and interest in current rock music -- we felt we needed to do more to convince them, with their tradition of question authority and all -- and, well, we must've got some of them at least because the polls were overwhelming in their insistence on my staunch credibility.
So, I just want to say again that my success is owed completely to you, my viewers, and your unbelievably vapid minds, inane gullibility, or busied, stressed, overworked, or threatened existences as to make you grasp at anything outside as being of more substance than what you feel inside, and perhaps more pleasant.
But whatever it is, thank you, and keep it up. In this next experiment, I'm sure you'll show up, among all the segments of our viewership, as being the least able to remember and the easiest to forget what we will tell you later tonight. I'm sure you can do it.
Oh, but now I'm forgetting. Sorry, I just got caught up in a wave of heartfelt gratitude to you all. The high ratings you give me and the solid staunch belief in my credibility that comes so high in the pollings, well they just … just that I get choked up … sorry, folks … this part is between me and you and … well, you'll forget it anyway, if it's decided by the Deciders later, that you can't have it … so between us, well, how do you thank someone who has taken you from the ratings floor to the moon? How do you thank someone who has given up their reason for your success? You see, I take it as a kind of personal affection you must have towards me, who you don't even know, to be so willing to be the greatest mass of idiot viewers on TV, getting the prize certainly. Because, you know, I simply can't imagine that people exist who could be so unbelievably lacking in reason, intelligence, or simply the ability to remember what we say from one night to the next, as to swallow so hungrily the pig slop that I've been out here portraying as accurate, unbiased, etc. HA. Ha. Oh, the drivel we won't say. So, unless somehow they've managed to create people with air balloons for brains… ha, ha…… No, No, no. Sorry, my friends, my bad on that. Let me assure you that has not happened. No, there are no people who's heads are actually balloons. Believe me, OK? Ok, then, what I'm saying is that unless the greatest percentage of you is vapid minded or brain dead -- and that I don't believe folks -- then the only thing could be that you folks really care about me and making me a success as to sacrifice your own thought, reason, and individuality. Well, yea, I'm sure you're getting something out of it too, Y'know. I'm sure it helps having not to think and being able to just tune in nightly to be told what's true and what to believe and never to be given anything unsettling or contrary as to cause you to be upset and have those horrible feelings of uncertainty.
So, anyway, we get it, we get each other, and together let's go make newscasting history -- if they'll ever keep an accurate one… hmmm… oh well. But at least for now, going back to what I was telling you about our next big wave of … well, some on our side might call it mind control or even enslavement … but you and I know that you're better off with us giving you your reality, your memories, your beliefs. I'm sure you've all realized by now that we're doing a whole lot better than the crappy reality you all had before we started helping you out.
So the exciting next phase, as I was saying begins with the slow elimination of recent memory, then memory further back. And to put it in a nutshell: We're going to give you new happier memories, and interpretations of those memories that you'll just relish. Just like we've recreated your present by substituting confusing reality with simple heart-warming, however untrue, views and perceptions. Well, together we've been so successful that we're going to show our gratitude by doing the same for your past. Of course, in pleasing our Deciders, it will be the grand events of the past, the ones that are in their interest to change, that will be conveniently removed and replaced by versions to suit them, but you can trust us, you'll much prefer, in fact we guarantee, you'll enjoy. And, be patient, once we've been able to do that; you're going to have to help of course… of course you will; with that accomplished, we'll be able to help more and more with your personal memories. Not too long now, and you'll have wonderful happy memories -- we'll have taken your miserable real ones -- splendid memories that will completely buttress the views that we've been feeding you, giving you personal, unreal, memories of personal experiences that prove the validity of the beliefs that we've caused you to have. And believe you me, we're going to load it up with goodies of all kinds -- ice cream dates, Christmases perfect and loving, Fourth of July celebrations and innocent love under the fireworks -- but that's enough. Just you be assured, your gonna have your very own "Happy Days" for a personal past. Our guarantee at CLN - the Central Lying News.
Now, back to regular programming, save one last reminder on our special tonight, the documentary, "Freedom of the Press, Repealed. The Story, and How -- This Repeal Now Thoroughly Institutionalized Over Six Years -- We Can Reveal How We've Duped You and Will Continue To." Tune in, don't miss it; You're sure to forget it."
***
Back to reality, I think, now let's take a look at that catscan from the past.
These writings I will reproduce here for your consideration. However keep in mind the date on the upcoming writing. The last date this piece was even touched was, as determined by the "date modified" figure, exactly 8/19/20000, at 9:41pm. That date, so long ago in my memory, really shocked me, especially in terms of the parallels with events today that were equally salient then. Substantial and important zeitgeists of that time are I believe made palpable. Considering what is going on right now in our political arenas, it may seem so tangible that you may forget that it is not about today. So I must stress that in no way, even slightly, was this writing altered.
"CAN AMERICA AFFORD TO GO "IN THE BUSHES"?
What They Succeeded in Having Us Believe and America's Last Chance to Realize the Ideals of a Generation
"Stay Out the Bushes!"
Yet Little Talk of Scandal Arose
At the Democratic Convention this past week, Jesse Jackson exhorted us "Stay out the Bushes"! His chant was echoed by the convention-goers, creating, arguably, the most dramatic event of the convention (though, since it was blacked out of all networks save C-Span, you probably didn't see it)1 He was referring to voting for George W. Bush for President, of course. But he gave examples of what his brother ("Baby Bush" as Jesse told it) did as Governor of Florida and George W.'s father ("Papa Bush," according to Jesse) did as President. He pointed out the heinous record of the Bush family, point by point, until he had the house rockin with "Stay out the Bushes!" It was clear that Jesse felt America could not afford the disaster of another Bush presidency.
Cut to another time, on the convention floor, when doing the roll call for electing the President, a delegate from my former home state of Colorado made mention of how another Bush son (I think he said Neils Bush) had run from Colorado in shame after squandering two-hundred million dollars (someone might correct me on the exact amount) of Coloradan's money in risky and unethical ventures when he was at the helm of a major Savings and Loan Corporation there. This was back in the days of the Savings and Loan scandal.
Despite the fact that the Republicans, including George Bush Senior, pledged hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out these corrupt banking officers at that time, little talk of scandal arose. This, even though it was said at the time that our grandchildren would still be paying, as taxpayers, on these hundreds of billions of dollars in S&L bailouts.
Yet little talk of scandal arose.
This is What They've Succeeded in Having Us Believe
Instead, years later, the media piled onto the flimsiest of evidence concerning Democratic President Bill Clinton and the supposed "Whitewater" scandal. Though, despite years of digging by an unlimitedly funded Special Prosecutor, they came up empty on anything illegal on the Clintons, the media was tireless in raising its voice in slandering our sitting Democratic President and his wife. It is my recollection also that the amount of money involved in the supposed scandal of Whitewater was a tiny fraction of that squandered by the Bush son (not to mention that involved in the entire S&L scandal) – I believe it was two million or less, making it about one-hundredth or less of that involved in Bush's Colorado S&L scandal. Despite these facts, the media had the American people believing that this was a story of so much importance and was such a scandal that it was often compared with Nixon's Watergate scandal.
This is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
So, what is my point?
Speaking to mostly Nader voters, and especially to "My Generation," I wish to pose this question: What have the Republicans accomplished in the last few decades? More correctly, what has the Shadow Government accomplished since the coup de etat, involving the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, which installed the Shadow Government, with its figurehead Lyndon Johnson at the highest levels of our government and has kept it there ever since except during the brief Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter and during the Clinton Presidency? Oh, but you say you thought Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK and that he was a lone, crazed gunman, who alone plotted and perpetrated the assassination? Very interesting.
Well, this is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
So a little history lesson for starters . . . for those who don't know: You thought the "Conspiracy Theory" of JFK's assassination was something that was put out by Oliver Stone in his movie, "JFK," and has been roundly repudiated. I know, I watched the movie and I watched the reaction on TV. I'll never forget the segment on CBS, with Dan Rather, which was announced as being a looking into the claims put out by Stone in his movie. I sat, amazed, as Rather focused on a few peripheral issues in the movie -- ones that I do not even remember being IN the movie -- and, proving them inaccurate, concluded that the movie "JFK" was pure fiction. Of course this is a common ploy to avoid dealing with an issue. It is diversion and distraction from the real issues, but it has a particular name: "setting up a straw man." In discrediting SOMETHING, Rather was claiming to have discredited EVERYTHING.
The whole show rested on his credibility with the American people. People who had not seen the movie came away convinced that the movie's plot and details were spun out of thin air. Those of us who saw the movie were silenced by the weight of CBS and Dan Rather and the influence they carry. (Interestingly, I have been told that Rather himself was in Dallas that day, as a journalist covering the story, when Kennedy was killed. Coincidence?)
But what was that, a decade ago? Times have changed. Only two weeks ago, I saw on the History Channel a series called "The Men Who Killed Kennedy." It spelled out in detail and with videotaped interviews of people close to the conspiracy and photos of the other men involved in the shooting just who killed Kennedy, who was behind it, who ordered it, and how it was carried out. There were in fact four gunmen. They were hired by the Mafia outside this country -- it was not clear just who had hired them, but it was people in this country.
And it was clear that people in the CIA, the FBI, and the local Dallas police were involved. It was also made clear that people as high up as Earl Warren, former Supreme Court Justice, were involved as they had gone along with it in putting out the Warren Commission Report -- a pack of lies. But don't take my word for it. You can see the documentary on the History channel yourself. I'm sure they will be playing it again and again.
But the upshot is that we had a coup in this country. That is in fact the last thing that was said in the documentary. It was said that this truth should come out so that people can know that it is not only Third-World undeveloped countries that can have coups; that in fact the source of worldwide democracy can itself have one, and indeed has had one in its recent past.
But the media in this country is still covering it up. This should be front-page news. It is not. The myth of the lone gunman and that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy still stands.
This is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
Furthermore, since Kennedy was assassinated, we accomplished several major things in this country: a major revised tax structure that took from the poor and gave to the rich in the Eighties -- called the largest transfer of wealth in American history; the escalation and deeper involvement in a Vietnam War -- costing many human lives, but benefitting the defense contractors (Kennedy was shot within a short time of his telling his advisors that he was going to back out of our involvement in Vietnam); the increased concentration of power in huge multinational countries -- many of whose revenues exceed that of half of the nations on the globe; and more recently, the defeat of a universal national health care plan along with a right-wing conspiracy (it has been proven, folks) against Bill and Hillary Clinton that has been going on since he took office in 1993.
These are just a few; I haven't even mentioned the obvious ones like Contragate and our illegal involvement in the affairs of Latin American countries. Now, all of this may sound paranoid.
But this is what they've succeeded in having you believe
What else have they succeeded in having us believe?
I recently received an e-mail from someone who responded to my Musepapers supporting Clinton regarding the Lewinsky scandal. He started his tirade with this "Clinton's a loser." Clinton a loser? Clinton -- only one of three presidents in the last fifty years of this country to succeed in getting elected a second time and having a full eight-year term. In fact, he is the only Democrat to accomplish that since FDR. And what did Clinton accomplish as Governor of Arkansas? What was it, some kind of record I think, since they have elections for Governors every two years there I believe. Anyway, I think he was elected to the governorship something like ten times. And then there is this guy, calling me "Dude," telling me that Clinton is a loser. I wonder who this guy is, and what he has accomplished in his life that he can call one of the most popular and elected public figures of our time a loser.
But, isn't that what we do? We see outside what we hold inside. Something tells me that this "dude" guy knows a lot more about being a "loser," than Clinton will ever know. Still, with the media's help, he thinks he has the right to pile on this besieged President, making claims about him that are absolutely dishonest on the plain surface of them.
But this is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
At the Democratic National Convention, Clinton was skewered by the media about his, supposedly "cheesy" long walk down through the halls to the auditorium as he was coming to make his speech. I found out only last night, days there had been a feeding frenzy on this issue -- one fat commentator saying it was the most "narcissistic" display he has seen in politics in his life. Then I find out only last night, days after this frenzy had been allowed to go on, that, in fact the major news networks, owned by the wealthy and the large corporations had taken the video of Clinton's walk and deleted something crucial that would make it have meaning to those of us who watched. It turns out that the program called for captions to be put up, during Clinton's long walk, on the bottom of the screen, detailing the accomplishments of this man's administration over seven and a half years.
If it were anyone else -- a Republican like Bush Senior or Reagan -- this would have been considered an aspect of simply honoring the hard work the man has done for the country. It would have been considered an honor he deserved, which he does (his accomplishments on turning around the country are unequaled in American history).
But the major networks DELETED the captions and deliberately made Clinton look bad. They called the walk, the "rock star" rock. They called it cheesy and narcissistic. Yet it only appeared so because the networks made it so. This is unheard of! You would never see the media interfering in the scripted programs of a Republican Convention. Yet this part of the script was denied the American people. Despite the fact that Clinton enjoys a 60+% approval rating -- higher even than Reagan or Eisenhower did at this time in their presidencies (and, by the way, these are the only two presidents who, as mentioned above, served a full eight years in office) -- the networks decided to make Clinton look bad by changing the script. How is this any different than, say, turning off the mike on him or one of the any other speakers when the media doesn't like what is being said. So this is an example of the media creating the news, not simply "reporting" it. Clinton's walk was supposed to be a summary of his accomplishments in office, which 60+% of the American people would have liked to see. It was not supposed to be a "cheesy" or "narcissistic" walk. Still it was reported in this way by the pundits and commentators and the journalists and anchorpersons on all the major networks (including and especially the ones that deleted the captions to make the walk appear that way).
So this is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
The night of the convention on which Joe Lieberman talked I heard him refer to previous presidents at one point and the last two of the four were "Reagan, and Clinton." This is what I heard; live on TV, with my own ears. Afterwards I came across a floor commentator state, in trying to keep alive the slander/scapegoating of Clinton, that it is noteworthy that Lieberman mentioned Reagan and significantly and deliberately left out Clinton. Yet no correction of these things ever occurs. One wonders if they are so caught up in their Pain and their hate or their desire to create a story, add to the drama, or whatever, that the TV journalist in question actually simply blocked out, in his mind, the next two words after the word "Reagan" and never heard them. This is in keeping with psychological understandings of what folks do to their very experience and reality. But the news media and our networks have lots of money to try to get the facts right. And they would have us believe that we have an unbiased news media, despite the evidence of our own ears.
This is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
I received an e-mail from someone who called me naïve in supporting the Iraqi bombing. Hussein propped up and made by the CIA.
But this is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
What else they have accomplished in this country. The mean-spiritedness. The cynicism.
Surely the tactic of scapegoating is a major human defense. Slander.
I've seen it used recently on myself and my wife by an organization with which we were not too long ago heavily involved.
Despite the fact that the media's prime way of commenting on events is to undo any good in any event that it is reporting on, they blame the lack of interest in the election and the lack of on the politicians.
This is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
Throughout the eight years of this administration - constant mention of the rumors and the leaks but woeful and begrudging of the coverage of the great and grand things this administration has achieved.
From the Right, Clinton can't get away with anything; from the Left, Clinton can't get credit for anything.
But this is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
I believe we are in grave danger of losing, not just an election, not just a Supreme Court, not just our environment, not just our good economy, not just our recent relative peace in the world but things far worse than those horrors. I believe we are in danger of losing all hope of maintaining, let alone progressing, in the freedoms and privileges that we take for granted.
Take HMO I have a sister But she has been and probably still will be voting Republican. She's certain that it is the Democrats who are at fault.
This is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
My spiritual teacher says we live in the Kali Yuga. It is the most unrighteous of times. A time in which black is portrayed as white and vice-versa. It is only an understanding this extreme that can assuage the frustration my wife and I feel when we tune in on the social hypocrisy and lying that we see on a daily basis on our TV screens.
Yet the talk shows are flooded with talk of hatred of Clinton and Democrats and talk of how….
In fact, just yesterday, Hillary Clinton, after spending uncountable amounts of money to bring down her and her husband, was absolved of any wrongdoing in the Whitewater suppose "scandal." This supposed "scandal" has hung over the White House for almost the entire Clinton presidency. Yet despite an unlimited amount of time and money they are able to come up with exactly zero on the Clintons. Yet, they say there is no right-wing conspiracy in this country.
Well, this is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
So is this election important? I believe it is. For me it is especially important, for I feel that if the Republicans take over, they will do so much damage to the dreams of my generation that even if the Democrats were to be reelected to all branches of government in 4 or 8 years, they will do so much damage (the example of Reagan-Bush nearly QUADRUPLING the National Debt in their mere 12 years being the perfect example) that My Generation will have to clean up their mess afterwards, taking more years. And only then will we be in a position to progress in this country and world and bring it more in line with the ideals of peace, love, community, and harmony we envisioned in the Sixties.
So what I mean is that if we fail in the next 80 days, I can envision no more time of real hope again, for this country or the world, until I am in my Sixties, Seventies, or older. And then, even then, there will be no real hope. For as it is said of the poor, these forces of regression, Cowboy shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot, cynicism, and – let us call it what it really is: evil – will always be with us.
I think if Gore loses, my wife and I might just move to Canada. Though with the increased nuclear threat, the global pollution, which the Republicans will surely bring, there will be no place to run or hide, really.
Gore wrote a book titled Earth in the Balance. Despite the fact Gore was ridiculed by Republicans in the Congress of our great land passages read out loud for the sake of derision. This is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
Concerning what this has to do with pre- and perinatal psychology, I want to point out that the cynical attitude is one wrought of early infant lack of bonding at birth. One is not nursed at birth, and is instead taken away to be "worked on" by total strangers. This leaves a lifelong imprint of hatred toward the world.BPM II hopelessness, hate, and derision.
Concerning what this has to do with psychohistory, well Lloyd deMause and psychohistorians after him, have pointed out that it is in the best of times that we have a tendency to get into wars and to create sacrificial victims to assuage our feelings of being "fat" and prosperous. This has its roots in the fact that the neonate, at birth, after accomplishing the huge achievement of being born, is, instead of being welcomed into the world, slapped around, shunted from place to place, measured and weighed and scrubbed clean, and taken away from the only world it has know -- it's mother -- to be placed into a sterile cradle or, worse, incubator. So we become frightened when we have accomplished something because our experience is that something worse will follow. To stave off that feeling, we make it happen. To stave off prosperity, we get into wars, or we squander our wealth (like current candidate Bush wants to do with our Budget Surplus). That way we can derail the rising feelings of "something worse is going to happen," which happens after or when we're about to accomplish prosperity and peace. We just have to screw it up.
Concerning also what this has to do with psychohistory, I want to point out that I read on the psychohistory listservice at one point last year . . . a Malthusian theory that has since been disproven (This is what they've succeeded in having us believe).
As for what this has to do with primal theory, it is part of the often observed tendency to shoot ourselves in the foot, when the going gets good, for having it good is not something we are used to; Pain is what we are familiar with; misery is what we know -- it constitutes the comfortable furniture of our meager existences.
Concerning what this has to do with Primal, I want to point out that the tendency to sabotage ourselves, to screw up any good thing, because bad things are what were familiar to ourselves, is the hallmark of neurosis and is what Primal helps us to overcome. Ally McBeal once had to see her psychotherapist because, as she put it, she was feeling happy. And John Cage offered to let her have his appointment spot because, as he put it, I've got some minor rejection anxiety and so on, but nothing as critical as feeling happy.
Concerning what this has to do with Breathwork, let me point out what Grof has said about the way we have manifested globally what is our perinatal, particularly BPM II and III experiences, in terms of "polluting our own nest," etc. etc. See the article on this site.
Concerning what it has to do with the New Age, if all the theories above come to pass this time, there will not be any "new age." In fact, we will continue down the path of struggling until the end of our days. -- Both the hippie and New Age visions of global peace, harmony, and love having turned out to be nothing but fantasies. Those of us involved in the New Age movement will end up feeling we have wasted our lives in a useless struggle. We will die, disillusioned and disappointed, like Abbie Hoffman was when he popped back the pills that took his life.
But again, there is hope in the fact that our closeness to our unconscious birth pain makes it possible for our society, for the first time in history, to not spoil, squander, or waste our accomplishments or prosperity, but to actually build on it, going into a new phase unlike anything known in history before -- a true New Age. My book, Apocalypse, Or New Age? (http://www.primalspirit.com/emerging_perinatal_book.htm), explains how this time has the chance of being different. And the current polls, which show Gore leading, indicate that we may just be on the road to that New Age after all.
I urge everyone to not just vote. I am taking time away from rebuilding my house, from doing my taxes for the last two years, from working on the lawsuit against the insurance company that has kept my wife and myself living out of an RV for over 14 months, and from an enormous number of tasks that have built up due to the fire and the other tragedies referred to above, in order to write this MusePaper. We plan to contact our local Democratic headquarters to see what we can do. We also plan to do much on this website to help to inform about this election and encourage people to do something concrete, not just to talk about it. For everyone who reads this and agrees with me on what I've written here, there are probably a thousand that do not – so much have they succeeded in getting so many to believe otherwise. Out of every hundred that agree, there are ninety-nine that will be too unable, physically, psychologically, or financially, or because of truly overriding time constraints, to take any action to prevent the tragedy of the Cowboy Ticket from getting elected. But I hope they will at least vote.
So if you are one of the ones left, consider how important it is for you to actually put some action alongside your beliefs. The other side is rich in the power of the push of their Pain, which causes them to fear, hate, distort, and rail against and destroy the good that is coming into being. They are themselves, though they may be anti-abortion, not pro-life but anti-life as they say and do the things that will kill the fetus of the New Age, which is currently growing in America's womb. The numbers of the fearful and in Pain are enormous and their resources are mighty. It is only our sweat, our belief in ourselves, our faith in the grace of a beneficent Higher Power or Universe, the strength of our combined numbers, the xxxx
That can keep this chapter in the novel of our lives from turning it in the direction of being, like the movies, one that ends up labeled a tragedy or that fits into the genres of the happily-ever-afters. You owe it to yourself to help yourself by getting involved. Of course, the world, the Universe, God/Goddess/Higher Power demand it of you too.
.Copyright © 2000 by Michael Derzak Adzema
***
I reread my words of nine years ago, e.g.:
"I believe we are in grave danger of losing, not just an election, not just a Supreme Court, not just our environment, not just our good economy, not just our recent relative peace in the world but things far worse than those horrors. I believe we are in danger of losing all hope of maintaining, let alone progressing, in the freedoms and privileges that we take for granted."
Hmm… Supreme Court? Check.
Environment? Check.
Our good economy? Well, that topic demands more than a mere "Check," in the obvious day and night quality of the change and the way it was done, the way it should have been foreseen, the way there was collusion at all levels for it to happen, and the obvious conclusions to be drawn as to who made it happen, and why, based on all the foreknowledge, was it intentional to devastate the richest country in the world and to bring its workers to their knees, as well as the American Government before all the other nations of the world, having to humiliate themselves as bedraggled homeless beggars, pleading for a handout, also on its knees. What kind of Americans would engage in such an act of undermining this country, an outright act of betrayal?
Just a side thought that might later have value for some: In writing that last, I was reminded of Judas selling out Jesus for 30 pieces of gold; and I was struck by the longevity and potency of a template, so simple -- in this age of Ocean's 11 and the high tech wizardry that could have been employed; and indeed was employed, e.g., for the 911 caper; yet this simple motive still moving people? -- Apparently so aligned with a human nature hardly unchanged.
Back to the economy, remember folks, at that time, still under Clinton and before Bush took office, we had a budget surplus that we were eagerly debating how we could use to benefit our country and world, including happy notions like universal solar for all homes, universal health care, and so many other things. So many ideas were bandied about -- all real possibilities considering the size of the surplus, which had been created by -- this should be kept in mind for it is hugely important later, and now -- the surplus was created by a moderate tax increase on the extremely rich and the creation of millions of new jobs, all tax paying jobs, combined with strict oversight of the costs of government programs and the reeling in of any that had the marks of beginning to get out of hand.
All those happy ideas of how to use the surplus -- yet no one envisioned the possibility that actually occurred, requiring as it would that people of unnatural stupidity or intent to harm would manage to not only win an election, but also take over government so thoroughly and eliminate intelligent input so thoroughly and seamlessly, and obliterate any and all objection at any level, including that of the media and therefore the population, well who WOULD have considered such an elaborate and abhorrent possibility -- for one thing its abject failure recently apparent; its certainty to benefit few if any, its guarantee of destroying huge benefits possible that would benefit virtually everyone; and alongside that no media or public outcry? Impossible. Who would have considered that? Who would have considered the surplus eventually being thrown into the "bring-back-the-flat-earth" bin essentially reviving the disproven economics of only eight years ago, that had led to a great recession, a Clinton victory, and the reversal of that policy with these spectacular results. Would this person have had to be asleep for 20 years, eight minimum, hopelessly self- and other-destructive? What?
Back to that time, however, still setting up the context that preceded the one of the last eight years. Clinton's plan was simple and it worked. So, simple policy that ordinary folks employ in balancing their household budgets, not rocket science, applied sincerely by Clinton, had achieved what had been considered the impossible and as elusive as the Holy Grail: the quest of the Balanced Budget,
Many a Republican President had claimed as a top priority and made a central plank in his election platform, but a term or two later, after absolute failure and in fact causing a tripling or quadrupling of the national debt instead, had claimed was as elusive and difficult to achieve as the Holy Grail, and also blamed the Democrats, largely for programs instituted in the past, like Social Security and Medicare, and so on, which they knew coming into office, and which they slashed. But still they could not achieve a balanced budget.
Then in comes Clinton, one of the supposedly free-spenders party, roundly criticized for budget-busting and national debt increasing policies (somehow the Republicans and media still were able to conflate the two even after 12 disastrous years of Reagan-Bush that had proved -- and dear people, if only it had been remembered, should have been proved for all time and become a huge national debate if not uproar when George W. Bush's first major act was to reverse the successful economic policies of Clinton and reinstitute those of Reagan-Bush, with everyone in complete remembrance of what a debacle that had been once.
But this is not brought out in the media.
In a country with a truly free press, not owned by the very people who would benefit by such a reversal, this renewal of the disastrous policies of only a decade earlier would have been all over the place and the analogies would ripe for picking, like: "Bush elects rebuilding the Titanic exactly the same way as before. Claims we as Americans are not dumb enough to run into icebergs as Europeans are."
Or, how about: "Bush proposes eliminating Food and Drug Administration, saying it will save taxpayers dollars. Claims no longer needed because the kindly corporations of the current era no longer need the regulations of the past, which were directed against people of a time that contained more unsavory, non-Patriotic, non-American types"
Even as I say these ridiculous things, I can't help realizing how variations of them were actually used, in pushing through the changes that resulted in the economic debacle currently. As one example: even Greenspan is reported at one time, I believe it was toward the end of the Clinton era, to have said that we have reached a point of corporate and monetary discipline wherein corporations can be expected to be self-disciplining and not requiring the regulations of the past, which, now acting as restrictions, if loosened, and trusting in their self-discipline, would free them to create greater prosperity, eventually benefitting all." Paraphrasing, but certainly Greenspan has been named one of the "Dirty Dozen" by CNN, in creating the economic debacle. And to his credit, this sorry character, has admitted his part and the wrongness of vision, advice, and recommendation.
But that example, with the very words Greenspan used and video of him saying it kept in the archives; and his clear retraction afterwards, again in his own words and captured unmistakably on video is a slam-dunk proven example that this inanity existed.
But the question that comes up, Is that not just an isolated example?
Wish that it were so. For this I have not at hand, though I 'm sure there are loads of written testimony and concrete evidence on the books that correspond nicely to create the proof that Bush's idiocy rose to the level of that portrayed earlier -- disbanding the protections of the American people, using inane ideas meant to pander and garner acceptability for disastrous policy reversals.
Oh, one more spoken one in evidence before I get to the less obvious but more comprehensive reversals that has Bush fully opting to remove all the protections deemed by legislators over hundreds of years to be necessary to protect average Americans from the tendency of the corporations in their greed and the pressure of competition to overreach with disastrous consequences for ordinary Americans, including their loss of life, health, and finances.
The one I'm speaking of has to do with the Maddof scandal. Called the largest "Ponzie" scheme in history, bilking so many of those who are in the know in Wall Street, or perhaps should have been, in that they had enough wealth to be, the pundits were nonstop in their analyzing various aspects of it that should have given rise to suspicion and led to investigation long before it actually occurred. There seemed again to be no end to the "I don't know how this happened. It shouldn't have. It seems impossible." Again that refrain. Lacking insight, history, perspective, and having gotten your job partially because of having a lack of understanding of the areas you cover, as opposed to a BETTER understanding, well, these things don't seem to have any causes any more than that chemicalized frozen chunk of jet restroom waste randomly landing here, as opposed to there.
Well that kind of "Somebody should have known, and we don't understand why they didn't" got blown out of the water when a former SEC official, an investigator or at least a would-be one came before Congress.
Well, before reiterating what transpired, let's not forget those weeks of "How could this have happened?" repeated endlessly.
The result of the testimony in Congress was that the SEC under Bush was told to lie low on investigating "anything" and, well, isn't this the way a C-student would think, essentially they were given the directive to look like they were busy but not to really accomplish anything or to their jobs.
What're you in Animal House, Bush? What're you, Blutto, telling the housemates,
"Hey, buds, there ain't no need to do any studying or any of that crap. Look, we got a good gig. I got elected President
(ok, maybe that part wouldn't be Blutto, however)
and that means (now sounding like Cartman) "I can do what I WANT!"
So, nobody can tell us what to do, and we're gonna paaaarrrtttttiiiiiii. Whooooo.
So, no homework. Don't worry, I've got it all worked out that we'll get the answers before every exam so that we can look like we're doing something.
Don't worry, you'll get your checks. And in the meantime, might I say, (now hollerin') "THERE'S A KEGGER JUST BEEN TAPPED IN THE KITCHEN," …. AND… (bringing the volume down low now, conspiratorially, like...) "and, for those so inclined… if you catch my drift… And now don't kill each other in the rush, be cool… well, let's just say that the microwave and toaster I hear, have been enlisted to aid in cooking up something, not so much for the palate, but (snorting loudly)… (And at that many of the frats had already started dashing towards the kitchen)
(And Blutto-Bush, raising his voice over the clamor now, and hollering above all :) "LET'S JUST SAY THAT - IF THE RIGHT IS RIGHT, THAN RIGHT IS WHITE. AND AIN'T NO BETTER BREAKFAST THAN THAT KIND 'S SERVED ON A MIRROR. Yee Haaaaa."
So, before attributing the obvious blame, let us not overlook this example, this one kind of example of something rampant throughout the media and throughout government at all levels during the eight years of Republican dominance:
For eight years Bush had let it be known that the SEC should not have to, in fact should back off, from investigating. Basically the SEC was told to not do its job; it was basically to pretend, to collect checks, to engage in busy work. And it wasn't the only agency that was disabled by Bush, but my point has more to do with journalism. For the question is, How could Bush have gotten away with all this? How could his dismantling of the functions of government put in place long ago by people, well, no stretch needed here, OBVIOUSLY smarter than him, gone UNREPORTED?
In any other time, does it not seem likely that this sort of disabling of the SEC would have been uncovered by the Fourth Estate, over the course of so many years? Were there no longer any investigative journalists in Washington? Were there just photogenic media personalities, with little knowledge of their area of reporting?
Well, from the sound of those journalists without a clue about the Maddoff scandal -- doing lots of on-air wondering and "gee, I dunno" "hard to understand" and such, instead of off-the-air investigation, which would have resulted in that time being used to enlighten the public about the unheard of government hand in undoing the government's work; instead of giving everyone the feeling that these things don't have individual actors behind them, no one accountable for them, and life is just a random series of accidents.
Breaking News: This just in… to my brain… Question: Is it possible that the "What-me-worry?" president's philosophy -- ok, let's say encapsulated by "Gee, I dunnoh. Nobody EVER imagined such a thing like that could happen. And besides, it's "hard work." So, as for responsibility, well "What, me worry?" –- Ok, understood now?
Y'know, the befuddled C student's view of the world: learned enough to know the kinds of things that happen, but not having studied enough or been curious enough to learn why they happen and crucially, how they are prevented, if not wanted, or made to happen, if desirable. (That would've gotten a B or A).
But the question remains: Did he bring in a wave of C students with him? Well, lots of evidence to that happening in his government, but, in the media? Well is it possible that he set the example of "Gee, I dunnoh" becoming acceptable.
Not so outrageous when you consider that Reagan did something very much akin to that, setting up the average know-nothing as somehow more astute because of genetically predisposed intuition to know without having to work to check, find out, research, or discover. Making the average schmuck feel like they were better than any college educated.
Pretty convenient too when you're policies include cutbacks in funding at all levels of education. So, Reagan's perfect scheme: Republican's know that educated people vote by great percentages more for Democrats than for Republicans. So, gut education. Make education more expensive. Continue to change higher education, as started in 1971, so it is swept of all the kinds of content and courses that often lead to insight and to individuals, and heavily fund highly specialized programs of ethically neutral technical information -- forget the arbitrary, culture and time-bound, and ephemeral and changing nature of those technicalities -- programs that would be designed by the corporations to produce the work pool they can feed from, already paid for trained by the government, something they had had to do in the past.
As for all those who don't get into higher education for lack of resources and all those who wouldn't have gone anyway, but would have felt inferior because of that: Well, in the anti-intellectualism that you put out (something that is a technique of every totalitarian government ever to have existed), they encourage the uneducated to feel they're smarter than if they had gone; and encourage them to look down on and despise the educated and what the educated come to discover if, for example, like global warming or the environment, like in Reagan's time, or the dangers of nuclear anything (again, Reagan's time), well, you can appeal directly to the uneducated to simply feel better that those idiots have scared the crap out of themselves with all that "book knowledge" when you, yourself, have the intuition of the common hard-working (uneducated) man to inform you of what's what, along with the help, of course, of a Republican party that understands you like a Daddy would, and, to hell with what they say about what the Republicans are supposedly doing to our wages and such; hell I just know that they's good people in noticing that I'm a better person than my smarter brother, cousin, father, sister, whatever, that went off to college and got their heads all dang messed up with big words that don't mean nothing.
So, "What me worry?"
Anyway, the Maddof scandal broke and the journalists were not knowledgeable in their field, did not have any investigative journalists in their entire corporation to uncover the obvious occurring in all Department's under Bush over many long years, were hired for their lack of vision and kept in the dark, or something. Anyway, it showed the continuing complicity, if not outright cooperation, in covering up the Republican's agenda and its failure as it became more and more apparent.
By the way, what happened at that Congressional hearing was that SEC employee detailed how he'd become aware of the Maddof scandal and had "begged" his superiors to be allowed to investigate it, turned down, and going back again and again, asking to be given permission to look into it, even offering to risk his life by going undercover to do it. Nothing. No permission granted. Nobody in the SEC wanting to know anything about the biggest ripoff of that sort in American history. The SEC assigned to be the one to oversee such activities absolutely refusing to do its job.
And, as I mentioned earlier, eventually it came out the way Bush disabled virtually all of government that had been put in place to protect Average Americans from large thievish entities, many of whom would affect them unknowingly and from afar (like Food, Drug, Water, etc.) with dire consequences. How he did it: He placed in the positions of highest power in these agencies people firmly entrenched with the industries or groups that are regulated by these agencies. Commonly, it is called hiring the fox to guard the henhouse.
Getting finally back to this checklist from 2000 after this long exposition about the economy, I said Bush's election would lead to our
"losing, not just an election, not just a Supreme Court, not just our environment, not just our good economy, not just our recent relative peace in the world but things far worse than those horrors. I believe we are in danger of losing all hope of maintaining, let alone progressing, in the freedoms and privileges that we take for granted"
We got as far as economy. Next, "our recent relative peace in the world"? Well, check. But shouldn't there be some kind of resounding howl, perhaps a chorus of screams, maybe of screams of the hundreds of thousands souls no longer here because of Bush's inept policy, which we see with no doubt now as Chevron and Exxon go in, that it was for oil. But so much is known and already said on that.
So, next: "but things far worse than those horrors
In this regard, I feel it is illuminating to relate an event I remember hearing on the financial news in America, on CNBC one day, sometime last fall. One of the expert trader/commentators was being interviewed on the floor of the actual exchange and surrounded by all the evidence of the carnage. He was asked to give his take on the scary and unprecedented retreat from stocks and those days of multi-hundred point losses, one after the other. This elderly obviously seasoned personality seemed to balloon out several sizes of his suit, in his sheer incomprehension and his near perfect confusion. Still, raising his voicing, a little more squeaky and almost embarrassed, Puffer-Fish guy held forth, as if written on tablets first, how "all the traders have lost money," and then "Nobody's doing OK... " But his afterthought hit me like a spear: He pleaded, "I mean who last year at this time foresaw anything like this coming…I mean," he said "anything at all, at all, like this coming up?"
I laughed out loud feeling the sharp pain in my belly. Is it funny, or horrible, that I had been making money hand over fist as I kept shorting the market, buying only puts. For this seasoned elderly guy, had not had a clue that this downturn could happen, nor apparently, had anyone, any trader, or any CNBC talking head, seen a thing. Still, lowly me, is it because I'm a Democrat? Lowly me, well I did I remember the way Reagan's "Robin-Hood-in-reverse" economics created a great recession, which brought Bill Clinton to power, incidentally, but also how everyone was alarmed at the size of the National Debt, which, during Reagan-Bush I, had more than tripled. It wasn't just me, for I found mentors in the market, who I picked because they also knew we were headed for collapse, and even got laughed at and ridiculed publically, on TV, for espousing his views. Still, I found these few not afraid to look squarely at the fundamentals and who were not Republican cheerleaders propping up a Bush economy of give-aways to those not needing it. The market crashed, and we saw the many others, who had been in bed with that Administration and represented the special interests, suddenly realize that Bush could not keep the party going endlessly - anymore than Reagan could. So, suddenly shocked that there were limitations, on things, they could be seen running for the exits like a bunch of cockroaches when the light is turned on.
I also watched as these Republican-speaking mouthpieces for the rich and for the economics of greed were more and more the only voices being heard when the Mr. Ed horse-like chart markings of the DOW began that nodding, as if to say, "I'm weary of being artificially propped up, Wil-ber! I just want to lie down, to let my head hang low, to rest, to not have to confirm self-serving theories of rich people, using their wealth to make the biased and twisted thinking of their underlings to be sounded endlessly above the din of the moaning masses as year after year they see their costs going up, wages stagnating, and their efforts, doubled, tripled, and beyond without being able to get their heads above it.
You see, Wilber, I'm tired of doing your bidding for, more than just it being wrong and this thievery perpetrated on the helpless being more feudal than economic, despite the big smokescreen of the god of capitalism or the supposed "free market." No, Wil-ber. And no matter how funny it might seem to you and your friends . . . this pulling off of a prank, once again, of stealing from the poor, it is in fact the same story of the rich making up rules to suit themselves that has been going on ever since humans stopped wandering and began living in stable groupings that allowed some men to gather more things about them than others (as nomads, no one wanted to "own" very much for it had to be carried. But ever since certain people began thinking they were privileged, better, and closer to goodness simply because of, say, being luckier, they have been sucking the very life blood out of the masses and keeping the poor downtrodden, ignorant, beholden to them whether rightfully or not, unhappy, and enslaved.
And Wilber, being a mere beast myself and seeing your kind forever expecting more as a matter of right is wrong enough, but I too keenly see also how forever unaware you are that suffering whether by beast or the unnamed masses is as real, as sharp, often much sharper, than that of the rich.
So I'm not lifting my head and braying your praises anymore, no matter what you do. You see, Wilber, your paid for support and theories are not only irrational and self-serving, they are not only harmful, and therefore not funny, and they not only spread waves of pain out from your high-handed actions. Your easy cruelty is not only unkind or unfair, you see, but it is murderous.
For just as Hitler once openly acted and believed that a better society would exist if the weak and unproductive and the lesser, by the determination alone, of the prejudices of him and his kind alone, and this resulted in the slaughter, suffering, murder, and elimination of millions -- millions who never got to find out what life could have been for them, well this same attitude murders people now, too. For there will always be those whose fate it is to stumble, to draw the black Ace. And lacking resources as they are made to live just on the edge of survival, some small thing to you might mean the end for one of them; it being just enough to break him so badly, like a whipped horse, you see, that such a person's mangled body will never rise again. So, not funny, Wilber, my head is down, and I won't be part of the big lie anymore."
Or so it seemed, as the Dow's mighty charts swung lower, then lower, then lower still. Expressing the weariness of the overworked masses and their despair as they were seeing their dreams of eking out a tad of happy existence, year by year, burdened with debt, seem to be further off, rather than closer. And the despairing millions give up their "ghosts" at that, regardless of how much longer their body manages to suffer through its daily movements, with little or nothing left to hope for. No, Wilber, your kind has infected the world with the lies that give you your brief period of privilege and superiority on this Earth. But not only have you stolen from the poor, but you've killed off God's creatures, mindlessly, in your vapid mind games, and now, even the planet itself.
So your kind will even kill off its own in the end. Your evil is in the end, at its base, the thick meaty dumbness that, and this is a bit funny, you see instead in those you despise. The jig has been up for many of the masses especially since the beginning of the 1980s. Many have suffered, fallen, and died, while you played. But now even you will know suffering. And it will be interesting to see just how much of your own entrails you will devour before it even occurs to the meaty thickness of your brain that it is you that you hurt.
And so said Ed. Thank you, Mr. Ed, I know you've been doing the rounds lately and I appreciate your making the time for us.
Now, back in 2000, I also had written:
I believe we are in grave danger of losing things far worse than those horrors. I believe we are in danger of losing all hope of maintaining, let alone progressing, in the freedoms and privileges that we take for granted.
I believe Ed speaks eloquently about those far greater horrors; indicating that they are dangers right now on our doorstep. We had a surplus and the will to tackle them nine years ago.
Sadly, we have wasted those nine years reversing the policies intended to help, and we have reversed our financial situation, which could have helped. And we have reversed the restrictions on corporations and many other policies that would have helped and at least slowed down this ominous impending doom. So we are nine years further along and have increased its acceleration at us, at the same time as we have reduced both our resources and the time in which to work.
The way I phrased it nine years ago:
"So is this election important? I believe it is. For me it is especially important, for I feel that if the Republicans take over, they will do so much damage to the dreams of my generation that even if the Democrats were to be reelected to all branches of government in 4 or 8 years, they will do so much damage (the example of Reagan-Bush nearly QUADRUPLING the National Debt in their mere 12 years being the perfect example) that My Generation will have to clean up their mess afterwards, taking more years. And only then will we be in a position to progress in this country and world and bring it more in line with the ideals of peace, love, community, and harmony we envisioned in the Sixties.
"So what I mean is that if we fail in the next 80 days, I can envision no more time of real hope again, for this country or the world, until I am in my Sixties, Seventies, or older. And then, even then, there will be no real hope. For as it is said of the poor, these forces of regression, Cowboy shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot, cynicism, and – let us call it what it really is: evil – will always be with us."
And sure enough, as we all know, what these people could not even imagine, as that trader put it, well its happening. This should be something to see.
As for Wall Street and the Economy, well on CNBC a couple of years before the huge downturn, they used to have Robert Reich on the show, Clinton's economic guy, but he was talked over, laughed at, and was routinely talked to as if he was a child or suffered sadly from some kind of bleeding heart brain cloud.
Well, as his words began to be the ones that should have been listened to, he was no longer to be seen. Thus we have such a comment that "nobody" could have seen it coming.
No, apparently there was such an insular crowd on Wall Street, the White House, and, most unfortunate, among the very media whose job it was neither to make news as prognosticators or economic experts, nor was it to be part of a partisan "anti-plunge patrol." Their lack of even-handedness and their alliance with particular theories, created just the kind of apparent reality that the trader bemoaned.
No, it wasn't that nobody was seeing it coming -- as you have seen, I was seeing it as inevitable from the shared experience of a mere decade or so ago. And I mention one figure who was silenced. So to the mystified trader who knew no one who saw anything but, as one particularly wrong-headed man phrased it, "a goldilocks economy."
So blinded by their greed, they missed what the people I knew were all seeing -- danger ahead, and the unsustainability of a rally that had risen on so much manipulation, misinformation, and constant drum blows of obviously wrong economic talking points hammered over and over across our airwaves and drowning out every sound of warning or opposition, so that surprise and misinformation informed the trading decisions of the great bull traders.
If you're still reading, you will see I have reasons for pointing these things out, providing this background, for it is this context of a kind of dumbness rising to the top, which even now, makes for the strangest of comments on TV talk shows, and the most asinine and foot--shooting policies and stances of the remaining Republicans.
All this being said, now, perhaps for you, the message in a bottle provided for you, as it did to me, a provocative window into the workings of cause and effect, as well as the of the huge efforts of deception that are ever needed to advance false partisan ideas that, though proven wrong, will by greed be raised anew and carried forth banner like, to beat back the voices of common sense in favor of a reality that must be forced to be made to be true only because its rich adherents would wish it to be so.
Another advantage of having the article is what we can learn about such warnings. The feel-good media, for the sake of ratings, will not tell you of impending doom, so that we might avert it. No, they will, as we've seen, report afterwards on it, and bring out the "no one could have seen this happening."
Well that is a self-serving lie, and I hope that is gleaned from all this if nothing else. Feel-good talk does not equal reality. If it did there would not have been the Nazis, a holocaust, a Stalin -- 5 million dead, a Cambodia - millions dead, a Rwanda - dead, dead, dead; or an AIDS epidemic - uncountable dead and growing.
Yet what I wrote nine years ago, at the time, if it had been shared in any place of power, would not doubt have been challenged by this word: "paranoid." This is the common way that the public uses denial to avoid harsh realities. Blame the messenger and the danger goes away.
I'm sure Mr. Ed's piece earlier has already been labeled that way. "Paranoid, it's all paranoia on the part of some "crazies.'" That is the way we keep out the truth. It's like using a drug to ease the pain of your cancer, but doesn't do anything to keep you from dying.
So Ed's lament however it is labeled as "paranoid," yet what he says is based on the best, most scientific understandings of our times. And it is so much more important in that we will likely reach the point of no return long before the masses of humanity are severely suffering from the continued environmental assault. I'm reluctant to say it, but it needs to be said that some are convinced that it is already too late, that we had our window of opportunity and blew it. I know of communities who are absolutely convinced that there's no saving us now and that it is naïve to expect anything but doom.
Still, for all that's been said about this message and what it has told us about what we lost and how far we are now from where we need to go; not to mention knowing that we were betrayed by our government, obviously, but now we know our media too helped, when they could have stopped it all. So these things we know. They are sobering realizations and ones we should not run from.
But, lastly and most importantly, these prescient thoughts of long ago help me: They inform me and sharpen my vision of the Now, as the events continue unfolding and rolling relentlessly over and through us and reflected in high-pixel, high-def, infinite colors clarity on the flat screens all about. This time is felt and witnessed, the story being revealed cinema-like, but with pundits galore expounding 24/7, like loud-mouthed fellow movie-goers, but then also becoming the movie and interwoven into the times themselves.
And their words, with this time capsule before me, sounding childish, repetitive, forgetful, amnesiacal. Especially as many of the ones speaking now are remembered as being the exact persons commenting then, and their words, little changed, bespeak a zen-like ability to be newly alarmed, being reborn in every minute, but yet totally unchanged and untaught by all the years of witnessing and commentary. So they also have forgotten the way they once saw the world and their life, just like me.
It seems a defense mechanism to forget that we saw all this coming, for to know that is to despair in realizing the impotence, even, of awareness. Who wants to realize that in these matters even a knowledge of the story line, as if having seen the movie once before, is totally useless, and that there is a helplessness in affecting the events of our lives and times, that there is a total futility in changing or steering away or around even the tragedies clearly seen beforehand? For knowing this we feel as detached as actual cinema-goers from the unfolding of the plotline; we feel ourselves to be not actors and hardly even the scriptwriters of our lives, instead merely the witnesses of intensely shocking and stunning events, which we actually expected but hoped we would be wrong.
So wouldn't we want to block that awareness of the futility of our actions? Wouldn't we have to in order to have the heart to keep going at it? To get up and keep trying every day? If we remembered, like Charlie Brown approaching the football, or like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill… if we remembered, would we continue to act?
No, we have to believe that we will be surprised this time, that indeed Lucy will hold the football and we will complete the kick. It is said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. As true as that is, how ironic then that we realize that those who remember history too clearly are doomed to helplessness in the midst of its unfolding. So it seems we are ineffectual either way.
Yet this is not the whole truth. If it were, then the cynicism we felt about "The Audacity of Hope" would have proven a correct perception. We would have been bored, again, watching a naïve young idealistic Black man, like the many before, differing only in skin color, see his efforts, visions, hopes, and heartfelt desires to be helpful and to love away some of the darkness in the world around vanish like the memory of yesterday's storm-driven winds. But we, I, was one time wrong in that cynicism.
To the astonishment, truly, of an entire world, Charlie Brown connected with the football, Lucy apologized for her past actions, one heavy boulder remained steady on the top of a hill and gave a man a much needed rest from his endless labors.
For one incredible and glorious time, the movie we'd seen had a different ending – amazing enough – but the tragedy in the original did not occur, and, as if God had for a time touched this planet, this Reality we call our World, our Life… had just for one time touched, tipped, and turned our events so that the awesomely unexpected happened.
So that a man so unbelievably naïve and unaware as to declare the "audacity of hope" and to call out and stir up the masses, deluding them as we've seen so many times before, that "yes, we can," would, and we'd have to pinch ourselves to believe it to actually be happening even as we witnessed it, actually succeed in doing exactly what he said he would do, would not only show us that a man could actually affect the course of events, that a person could not only change things from the way they'd always been (what kind of man can this be?), but that he would do it in a grand and sweeping way.
That a man who said "yes we can" not only could, but could do it in a way that achieved beyond merely succeeding; never mind that merely succeeding would be doing the impossible.
So I am saddened having been awakened from my forgetfulness by this catscan of a mind perfectly preserved in an electronically sealed time capsule… oh, what could have been… but then I remember, happily, that we are, I am, imperfect prophets and seers, that just when it seems we know, for sure now, how things are, the way the world is, and how the movie will end, that just then when we know, totally convinced we are, that truly things will be as they will be and that it is futile to rail against the inevitable, to hope, even to try, that just then when we have finally accepted "reality for what it is," accepted "life on its own terms" not ours, that we'd given up the things of youth, accepted the limitations of life, addressed ourselves, resignedly, to carrying forward on the mundane things of life, to the ordinary activities of everyperson, to the simple responsibilities and expectations of every man, every person, from every time that's every been and accepted the unrelenting lack of specialness in either our times or ourselves… that just at that time we would be touched and wakened to see that the most unchanging thing of life is not its utter resistance to change, its utter forgetfulness and repetition, but is the mysterious darkness surrounding the utter clarity of everyday knowingness, is in fact the imperfection of ourselves even as we observe so clearly the assured imperfection of the world.
Knowing that, we know that it is exactly that imperfection, that lack, that evil, that unmoving wrongness of the world that we have tried so futilely to change that, being in us, is the source of the blessedness of life, which is the fact that our ultimate unknowingness is the only true source of a hope that IS real, that being wrong, being imperfect means something unbelievable when you think of it: which is that against all odds, "something wonderful is going to happen," that in spite of ourselves the miraculous can happen, that magic is real, and that hope, and happiness, and blessedness, and forgiveness, and glorious divine wonders beyond even the envisioning of our ideals are possible.
And all because the only thing that we can be truly sure of (even when we are finally convinced that we should not expect anything special) is that we can never be sure… which means that anything is possible… which means that everything is possible.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
C’mon Everyone Join in Now: “Why, Thank you, George Bush!”
............This is my little, let us
say, oh, "thank you note" to George Bush for all his hard efforts.
Also, in appreciation of the Paulsie Scam
which we will be dealing with forever;
luckily it's been arranged that won't be too long.
..
Can you say it with me,
"Thanks George W. Bush for all your efforts and "hard work" which have led,
your decisions and your Administration solely to blame
– thank you for being "THE DECIDER!" by the way --
to leave us in the midst of so many dire and rapidly expanding problems, so that many people are not just wondering if they will have a job or money, but that even if this planet will make it through another fifty years.
So, hey, thanks for all the hard work and for relieving us and all our
grandchildren of any money, and…. oh, I see, there probably won't be any planet
for the little dears to live on. And everyone dead and all. Why, gosh, Mr. W.,
you're so smart, you probably knew that!
So that's why you and your cronies went so far as to commit grand larceny even at the end, scraping out the last of any money in the Treasury -- wasn't much left for Obama to do with anyway, after your eight years of partying on high with your Halliburton and your god-only-knows faceless "filthy rich," gang. Must've felt like the ol' times, eh, except for the cocaine. . . Er, I mean, I didn't mean to presume, I mean, you can have cocaine, who am I…
Oh! What a relief, glad to hear you did not partake like the others. It's just that, I mean George, friend, my Man here, c'mon there were some pretty weird dancing and stuff and things that had me wondering and worrying… Oh, I get it, no cocaine, but wink, wink, you've got your ways you say? Hmmm? Finding things better than cocaine and getting away with it? Well, he he, I'm not about to judge. I mean if we can have Rush Limbaugh asking for drug users to be hung up by their fingernails, even as he's got a constant drip for a codeine fix, and he gets away scot free, why shouldn't you have your fun. You alsways said it wass hardwork.
But I gotta get back to that stunt with the Treasury at the very end. I mean many, many a lesser, "criminal," shall we say," mind would never go back again and again, let alone in broad daylight and in front of the entire world! Gad! Was this all your idea to totally take everything while you could? Somebody else's. Anyway, it was brilliant.
First, you enlist the support of that guy Paulson. Er, now that I know more about him, being worth $700 million, like and, getting bonuses of $37 million in 2005 and then 16.4 million the next year, why, could it actually be that he was the one that talked you into it!!! Certainly, he'd have to be characterized as one of them "filthy rich" that you helped to create, making people wonder who's really calling the shots in Washington.
But, never mind, even if it was his good idea -- and now I understand he's had plenty of experience -- being involved with the folks who did Watergate at all -- so that no doubt he's got lots of good ideas. But, hell, don't want to take any shine offa your apples. No, it was you who chose him. And despite his background, managed to get him on your side and portrayed as one of the most well-respected on Wall Street (of course that was the old Wall Street), because as we now know, those bonuses and stuff aren't too popular right now. Anyhow, brilliant move, you put this man of yours on task for the high-pressured auto trading that you knew would be required to pull off such a heist.
So you had your guy Paulson, former head of Goldman Sachs before coming to take this position of Secretary of Treasury for you. And now we find out that none of that money went where it was intended to go and it did not change the situation but rather exacerbated it! In fact… oh but then you already would have known this, no? How recently it's come up that $16 billion dollars came through a German bank, Paulson giving like 45 billion and then having 16 of it come back to Goldman Sachs.
What a crackup this guy is being. I mean he had everyone fooled, and, in fact, there is nothing at all being said about his involvement or his possible effects on what happened, even to this day. That's smoothness even you and I could learn from , y'know, Mr. W
More on that later. But just want to say how cute you are, W.. I mean, it was
just, soooooo you! We heard afterwards how your guys gathered Congressional
leaders and without exactly explaining how it would happen – of course
Congressmen could not be expected to understand the workings of economics and
high finance like a Paulson could.
So, kindly Paulson and his deputies explained using analogies, how nice of them to bring it down to their level, so sweet of them. And the analogy they used was that if Congress didn't cough upt he dough pronto – perhaps those weren't the exact words, my bad. But anyway, that the consequences – and tell me W. this was all you, right? – The consequences would be that of a "GLOBAL ECONOMIC MELTDOWN" (tell me, that part was you, right?) a terminal global economic meltdown that would ….
(wait, I'm getting an inkling here… was this next part, Cheney's?) "End modern civilization as we know it for the foreseeable future."
Wow! It gives me shivers just hearing it. I mean there ain't no auto salesman in his wildest fantasies that could come up with something so absolutely, well, disabling. You guys really took those suckers in Congress "out by the knees"! How could they have had a chance! And, boy, there's that implied nuclear thing again…"the meltdown"; yea. Doesn't have to make any sense; I mean economics melting, but hey close enough. How clever!
I mean that whole image of mushroom cloud, why it just worked stupendously to get us into a war. And now, this being economics… Oh, my God, I see it; it's like a fifties movie -- "Oh, please help, we're meeee-ee-llll-tiiinggg." Yea, super scary. Heck, anything like that from fifties horror flicks…just good stuff. Heck, you know that most people believe that stuff anyway. So, I see, you feed them what they always feared anyway. Brilliant. Brilliant.
But that's my George, the W. himself, going with what he knows. And, hey, why bother coming up with anything else, that card's a winner for you, my man…. And c'mon, level with me, I just gotta know, won't tell anyone else…
Was that Cheney with the "end of civilization" part? C'mon, he's already living the Wild West out there in Wyoming, course it'd be him? Right?
C'mon, it's got to be him, that's just sooo Darth Vader, who else could think like that.
Please tell me I'm right; I feel like I know this guy
and that is well just sooooo him!...
On Cultural Change, Consciousness, and Music by SillyMickel Adzema
The Perfect Confluence of Context, Moment, and Person Makes History – e.g., Obama's Astonishing Rise to Presidency
But the Perfect Alignment of a Nation's or World's Deep Mood, the Moment, and a Musician or Artist Can Change the World Forever - e.g., The Beatles
The Consciousness Expanding Potency of
Will Oldham's Aural Creations. Welcome, strange new preternaturally profound world.
Your clarity could not possibly have dawned at a better time in our darkening and drowsy world.
Will Personal and Social Change Synergize Again As Powerfully, As Suddenly, and As Wonderfully Exciting, Beautiful, and Lasting as Before?
Like Bob Dylan, Will Oldham has discovered a New Musical Paradigm; unlike Dylan, the Times are only now beginning to catch up to him. But they have, and the post-Bush era context is seriously Jonesing for such a combination of Authenticity and Fresh New Musical Universes of Mind to inspire and make us whole again.
If this Social Context should meet this Musical New Paradigm and its Template, Oldham;
think powder keg potency for cultural flowering and a powerful wind at the backs of the Noble, True, and Heroic the era we're entering desperately calls for.
Another generation brings forth a musical genius, arguably surpassing an earlier one's Bob Dylan. After so many decades of the world wondering why there has not been a phenomenon such as Dylan since him, and how any person could be so unique, so brilliant that even the closest pretenders only paled, and failed our hopes, a world has given up, and stopped looking. And just at this point when no one any longer is even asking the question, such a phenomenon arises -- as Dylanesque as Bob in that Will Oldham is so incomparable to Dylan, so unlike him. Now, why did we not realize it would HAVE to be that way? Anyway, he is not Dylanesque at all; he is just, well, like Dylan, in his being so unbelievably, unexpectedly unlike anything we have ever seen or heard on this planet before.
Will Oldham, who also goes by the name "Bonnie" Prince Billy, has for years been quietly making musical history outside the mainstream. His recording sessions are one-shot deals; the invited artists know that they will create music that they will never reproduce the same way again. For the music that's recorded is the first and only go through. Oldham also eschews the post-recording tweaking and redoing. Instead it is stamped and sold, in its "unpolished" state. And if you think that unprofessional then you are probably also the kind of person who would not see why anyone would bother to grow their own tomatoes when perfect ones can be bought at the grocery.
Will Oldham has that kind of genius; he's known for a long time that beauty lies not in the precise, the perfect mathematical expression, but rather in the random spontaneous human sense, the intuitive impulse, flash of instinct, occurring without forethought, weaving in or interrupting the intended progressions one is envisioning in one's head and attempting to recreate on the outside. The polished musician finds that a part of himself, or perhaps it is a force outside demanding inclusion, finds that the actuality irresistibly breaks in, adlibbing, adding the perfect unintended piece that moment seems to demand, or perhaps it is a force inside or outside that shows up unannounced to collaborate, but only during the final scene, the one that counts, as if each moment and only in the to adlib, adding magic and the unintended to the creation. But this kind of unconscious adlib, which borders the divine, only happens during that one particular playing of that piece. Any other playing would not have those exact same impulses, any more than any moment can be exactly like another or any snowflake exactly like another. It is true that not everyone will think that every unexpected straying from the envisioned piece is good, let alone magical; certainly this technique allows that we hear the unintended off-pitch notes as well, also any mistakes in playing will be heard in the finished piece.
But there are two things that need to be said about that imperfection: 1st) This kind of production requires a kind of faith in the innate talent of the musicians combined; a more religious person might say it requires a faith in God that what is meant to be produced will be produced, so why second guess the moment? And, sure enough, this does allow for the spontaneous, magical, and unintended that is somehow beyond what any of them envisioned, and so is sometimes beyond what any human has ever imagined, and those moments are sublime. When I hear them I feel a sense of divinity in it; like getting the aural equivalent of a glimpse into divine perfection and beauty. 2nd) Speaking for myself, I grew up in an age -- pushed mightily by the modern technologies that allowed it -- of music where the perfection of voice, tempo, and instrument was the goal and helped to define one kind of music as better than another. While this impossibility could not be achieved in the recording session, no matter how many takes, it could be produced afterwards through electronic manipulation of every aspect of the production, to make it "picture" perfect.
Having grown up with such electronic (sometimes boring) perfection , I thought it added a very rarely heard human quality to Will Oldhams's music when I noticed some off pitch places in it. But more than that -- and I don't think I am the only one that feels this way listening to this music -- I felt closer to the artist personally! His imperfection was a crack in the mask that humans all have, and because of this crack I was drawn to the songwriter-singer as much as the song. I felt, in a way privileged that he allowed me to see his humanness. I don't think that at all strange, as I feel it is true in our feelings about everything that is presented for public consumption.
It seems so obvious to me now that the human sounding piece is going to be more appealing to Humans than the polished and perfected ones that I don't see why no one has seen this before, instead thinking that we wanted mathematically precise art (music) just because we want our buildings, furniture, computers to be mathematically precise. I would be exaggerating to compare the two by using an analogy of live music compared to Muzak, but that is the kind of tendency I see in the manufactured productions. But for some reason Will Oldham sensed all of this, when no one else did... No, not like him. This is one way that his natural authenticity of person has led him to create authentic, real (one-of-a-kind) music that I deem to be at least as much of a paradigm shift away from his contemporaries as The Beatles were to the music of fifty years ago. But the thing that makes him the greatest musical artist of our time -- like Bob Dylan but much more honest in his lyrics and therefore revolutionary in his influence -- is the total authenticity, vulnerability, realness, and fearless self-expression that no one else brings to his art, save John Lennon during his primal phase and Yoko Ono since then and to this day.
With his radical techniques, radical fearless self-expression, and his superb musicianship, he is the only musician since Dylan to open musical doorways in your mind to other realities that are far different and more wondrous than you've ever experienced.
While not recognized early like Dylan, his influence may soon be known. For in the post-Bush, Obama era in which authenticity is once again valued, like it was in the Sixties, he stands out in his field, for the exact same reason that Obama did; his obvious unpretentious realness. Indeed, his prospects for gaining the attention that he deserves, and which the world would be much the better for, may be rosier, perhaps by far, than I first stated pointing to the valuing of authenticity.
This is purely my sense, but I feel it emerging and growing and nearing such a point of explosive release into the global zeitgeist as surely as I am able to feel the ground moving and bucking during an earthquake in my home state of California. What it is that I feel can hardly be contained by a word such as "valued." What I am sensing in America is a tremendous amount of energy pent up from the eight Bush years that has not yet found an expression for release. Sure, there is rage and anger still, but much of that is dispelled by Obama for he pleases and serves in so many of the ways that Bush instead just piled up frustration. But what is stronger, I believe, is the feelings in Americans built up over eight years in which on what seemed nearly a daily basis Americans learned little by little, piece by piece, and then pile upon pile that virtually every aspect of Bush and Cheney and their administration was, well, at first, covered up by lies, then further on that it was riddled with corruption, and eventually, and still years before he would go, the majority of Americans could see that his election and his administration was perhaps the biggest con on the largest scale any of us had ever experienced.
I cannot state it strongly enough; I've never observed such intensity and passion in Americans, expressed in the amount of disgust, anger, and the feelings of betrayal. Not to mince words, it was common that ordinary folks conclusion of all the cumulative corruption and tendencies to act in ways that would not solve problems but only make them worse, often because the solutions would always seem to involve benefitting the in-group as the first priority, was that our government had been hijacked by nothing less than criminals, who did everything solely for ends beneficial to them; worse, that they would only do things that were beneficial to them; leaving all the big problems facing the majority of Americans not like them completely ignored. Again, I must be blunt and say it the way that no one else will (hiding behind their euphemisms; as a kind of built in denial of their having said it if they are confronted). No, what I heard will not be filtered through some corporate, or middle-class-sensibility of being nice Matrix. For what we experienced was no tea party and should not be talked about as if we are discussing art. So, I must say, bluntly as it was said to me, that some folks felt the Bush-Cheney group was some kind of organized crime in control of our country. While others put out that such a notion was an insult to the Mafia, for, it was thought, even the Mafia would not, could not be as completely compassionless and incompetent; nor would they be -- as the Bush-Cheney-Rove team seemed to be -- intent on destroying our government, our constitution, our freedoms through the bill of rights, and even our democracy through the scandals of electronic voting machines -- produced by Republicans (Diebold, Corp. to be exact, the President of which guaranteed a Bush win way before the election) which they, alone, had sole and easy control over determining what those machines would end up reporting, whether it was the actual count or something decided by them.
And still worse in American's eyes, that these criminals were protected solely by a kind of tradition and a general feeling -- the Congress having decided this -- that going after a sitting President would be more harmful to the nation than the harm being allowed to continue by the administration being waited out. I think that subsequent events proved that notion wrong. As for American perceptions, you might call them perhaps not astute enough in sensing the criminality! As one recent book, which looked into all these unprecedented Executive approaches (again, using a euphemism) to the job of governing detailed that America had devolved into dictatorship during that period. The idea that we had lost our democracy was palpable, but no one wanted to believe such a horrible thing, so no one would state it, let alone pursue it.
This is just one example of "The Things Nobody Seems Willing to Say" -- the title of my blog (but unfortunately I have far more material than I would like for a category such as that, in the wake of the last era, which seemed to keep the American people fearful, in a trance, and the pundits too fearful to do anything but go along with the falsity and the creation of the Matrix -- the mainstream version of administration lies mixed with the palliatives of trivialities and feel-good stories -- why? To be able to continue profiting from the ads of the huge corporations that were largely of the same agenda as Bush's (or Bush had theirs), and for fear of the administration and its adoption of dictatorial powers, but alongside this concession to the paradigm of misinformation, they also needed the support of viewership, thus the palliative feel good, or the dramatized, keep-you-glued-to-your-seat trivialities, such as the blocking out of regular news for hours, e.g., while watching a disabled plane on a runway, the passengers not disembarking immediately, and pundits watching with nothing moving. So, with air time to burn trying to gin up this event, they resorting to turning the slightest rumor into a 10 minute or more topic of discussion; along with long periods of silence; and then the pundit's inane comments, obviously feeling foolish, they grasped desperately at the ploy of hoping to come across as compassionate, clever, or of high moral character in one's comments. Watching people make fools of themselves, when they have nothing to say, often resorting to little tidbits the plot of which is essentially them as hero/heroine, well that's the Matrix, and that's why there's still so many "things nobody seems willing to say."
But that is not what I am writing about now; although I am setting up a context for the remainder of this piece. And as surely as the McCarthyism, the Cold War with its push toward conformism equaling Americanism in the U.S., and the Vietnam War had a lot to do with creating a Bob Dylan that would (first) push a Zimmerman to become a phenomenon, and (2) create a society that would recognize one; as surely as that same context of conformism, existence of huge corporations of massive, and often monopolistic powers, alongside the Cold War sentiment that would have most Americans welcome these huge institutions as symbols of strength -- substitutes for the strong men of the early agrarians period -- but with that same sense of playing the roles of good strong Daddies, protecting us from evil abroad, rewarding us with good-paying jobs, a sense of belonging, and in the minds of those they employed especially, a feeling of love toward the corporation, neurotically deflected from their own real daddies, who in their harsh treatment of children at that time, left the young boys starving for the substitute that would give them the love, protection, and strength, and direction, which they didn't get from their real fathers; and in exchange only asked that same thing of which fathers everywhere ask: that you suck up and grovel and be willing to humiliate yourself at any moment, and that you give up your soul and become instead a corporate man whose soul was equal to that of the corporations, and whose goal and direction were given to them from the outside and were those of the corporation; and a context where the corporations and their lackeys in radio determined for the population at large, as they did for the corporations, what music would be played, -- mass produced in advance, and tending toward the palliative, somnolent, and the nondisturbing.
For a country that has lost its soul, feels ripped off from its self and thus from having a life, and they feel themselves to be living half-lives, zombie lives. So the radio palliatives were ever so important and needed, or as Nirvana (Kurt Cobain) put it, the palliatives were the necessary breathing holes given after you've been locked in a jar, so that you can convince yourself you are happy ("but you're really in the laundry room"). .And then of course the Vietnam war increasingly became bigger in the context. This was the context in the early 60s, though I it would be totally unfair to not mention the very important folk music era of the late 50s and very early 60s -- a kind of a first rebellion against the zombie lives, in matching sweaters granted, but which did hearken back to the Depression era and other times of oppression in speaking out for the forgotten in America, the poor, the other-than-corporate, the unions, indeed, the individual.
That was the American context into which the Beatles came and sang to a young generation that did not want to lose its soul, as it had seen its parents do. The Beatles spoke of an innocence, a male role that was real ("I want to hold your hand."), and not dramatized, to make up for the fact of not having real feelings, and also as a warning against nonconformism ("Teen Angel," "Leader of the Pack," etc.).
The Beatles continued to carry America's youth, with each recording, further from the conformism of their youth, and showed them and sang to them of values of authenticity, realness, and truth, as well as real, not fake, fun. This thrilled a generation and inspired them to be true to themselves, created a generation gap, and changed the world.
My point is that (1) popular music can be extremely powerful and revolutionary; as the Beatles themselves portrayed it in "Yellow Submarine": In the land of the Blue Meanies, which outlawed music, and whose world was dominated by bleak monotone shades and unhappy people. It was Sergeant Peppers' Lonely Hearts Club Band, who defiantly stepped forth and produced music, breaking all kinds of Blue Meanies laws. But the music was so powerful that it brought joy, hope, and happiness back into the hearts of the people of that sorry land; indeed music was so powerful as to bring back color, all kinds of color, and everywhere you could see, turning the bleak land festive. Music as a revolutionary act, powerful enough to wrest control of the land and its people out of the hands of the Blue Meanies, for the capacity of music to help you to feel and thus wake up from zombieness, caused the Blue Meanies, whose control depended on people not feeling, or thinking, or questioning, just obeying and being grateful; well the music had the opposite effect on them, causing them to go mad or to flee far away. Does any of this sound pertinent here? Or in our current social context?
My other point (2) is that, not just any music -- for we have seen that music can be employed to induce trancelike conformist behavior -- BUT, radically different music than what is currently heard, occurring within a context where change is of the quality of a bodily need and craving, that music which uniquely satisfies that craving makes geniuses of those musicians, turns them into the new role models to follow as paths to regain what was lost and is sorely missed. And turns these musicians into phenomenon that have tremendous power as catalysts in changing culture.
So my reasons for stating the current context are that, once again, we are at another extreme context , this one being one where lying, manipulation, and deception were the mode of the Executive Branch, and it was virtually at war with the rest of the government and much of the American people. Further, that a helplessness and an urge to do something, when nothing could be done, continued to build, for years. I'm saying that Obama's success rode on this wave of wanting to do something. But it was the specific urges that continued increasing and building and that didn't get released that I believe will be shaping America for quite a while. Specifically, I believe that it is not just authenticity that is valued again. I believe that Americans are absolutely dying of thirst for lack of truth, they are starving for lack of the real, I am saying that those 8 years made Americans so to despise the eventually transparent falsity of every act out of the Bush administration that has made Americans of all ages and particularly the young, crave like a drowning man, for the substantial, the real, the authentic, the honest, and the true.
Fortunately this is no bad thing and it is certainly better than the complacency that once characterized Americans reactions to the threats against America's basic values. It is my hope that it will be strong enough to lead Americans to get their heads out of the sand and face the many environmental challenges that so many of them have wanted to ignore. Be that as it may, if a part of my feeling only is correct, we may see many Obama type unprecedented events.
And I believe that the most likely to benefit from this craving for some truth, in the field of music, will be Will Oldham. It is because of both the extreme context and the craving it produces in people and the absolutely perfect person who has the perfect message, template for a different way, and a heads above all others talent and refreshing new sounds, which combined create phenomenon in art that then reflect back and help to change society and culture. That is why at the outset I compared him to Dylan, for it is not just his new paradigm music, but that we are, like in the Sixties, sitting on a powerderkeg of context that could turn his genius into something more than profound music affecting the fringe, but could see him as the phenomenon required by our times, just as Obama was the phenomenon required by our times in politics.
Authenticity and naturalness, and lack of pretention are highly attractive in general to all except those who have deeply hidden or very dark agendas. But for the rest of us, there is a magnetic attraction to and affection for those, even who we don't know personally, but who are transparent and self-revelatory. We feel we can trust them, our hearts may even go out to them as we can even sense their feelings in the fact that they are so open and descriptive of their struggles, and we get the sense, which is the truth, that they are very much like us.
So it is my sense and I propose some promising developments to come out of it, just like the miracle of Obama's win. But it is Will Oldham that I wish to shine the spotlight on. My digression into the mood of a country is more to help us understand how such a phenomenon is not already seen that way. And to that I say that times of deception, greed, and manipulation do tend to make stars out of the corporate lackeys, those who would use any talent they might have in service to the views of focus groups and the like. But that period is over and I believe that we will see reversals in many more areas of life and all of them guided by the desire to regain the real.
Will Oldham is not just authentic, though. And that is what is so pleasing about the prospects for his music to be enjoyed and to open the minds of so many more people. For he is like Obama in an important way: his unrivaled fearless realness is married with superb skills of his craft, an intuitive sense to know where music has not been and to explore, and for these reasons he has inspired others in music, like Obama has in politics. If he were to become known, and mirror Obama that way as well, I predict that his influence, due to the new worlds of musical pleasure and affect he has opened, would track not so much Dylan's cultural influence as the Beatles' much wider, deeper, and worldwide influence; not to mention the true new paradigm of music they opened up, which musicians from then on looked upon as the standard, with the palliative music of just a short while earlier, gone forever, save the occasional nostalgic trip into denialville that some folks apparently need.
I say that Oldham's influence, if the light should shine his way, would have more of the consciousness changing potential of the Beatles, than Dylan's influence mostly on music and the political feelings of a generation that was too easily gone with the tide, because having lived through the Beatles and witnessed the change of a musical paradigm, having enjoyed the freshness and inspiration they brought into our our lives (Let's be honest, now, Yellow Submarine was no fantasy. I lived under the Blue Meanies in the black and white bleak Fifties world. And the Beatles did for my world what they showed Sergeant Peppers' doing in the movie), I experienced the Beatles bringing such freshness and inspiration to my generation as to create sweeping changes in our minds of what is considered possible, and with that attitude, shared by a generation, we changed the world forever, not in the grandest and most incredible changes we imagined possible at the time, but still, even with the resistance of decades of Blue Meanies, there will never again be the completely monotone world of the Fifties, with all its secrets, and its suppression/repression (though Bush was on his way in attempting such a thing).
And that kind of sweeping change, coming from the inspiration of music and the kind of musicians making it, and arriving in just the right spot and just the perfect time, has had more influence than any of the politicians, at any level, has had since. In fact, I cannot think of a phenomenon of such power as the Beatles to catalyze lasting cultural change coming from any aspect of our society or culture since that time. I certainly know that I did not experience that feeling of things being able to be completely redone, this time correctly, ever again in the nearly 50 years since.
Except....
I'll never forget that night -- approximately one year ago to the day -- one night that changed me and everything. I came across Will Oldhams's music completely serendipitously, as I was doing research on the web. My immediate thought was "What the hell is this?" I really didn't know if I thought some of what I heard was crap or incredible. But I listened to more and found that most of Oldham's music has an easier entry for the uninitiated. I was so struck that I checked him out on Google and was surprised to find in Wikipedia what a splash he'd already made in several fields, and what an influence he was on others, and how incredibly prolific he was. I found out about the way he produced music and his theory on it. Then I remembered how Dylan was much more an acquired taste for me than was Oldham's. I read an article interview with him and began to understand the man more. That's all. With that little bit of understanding removing those outworn and unwanted anyway preconceptions of what music is supposed to sound like, I was free to hear him without those filters and to hear him Zen-like, first perception-like.
And with that I could not stop listening as I felt that I was hearing hope for another generation to throw off its Blue Meanies. Will Oldham, without a doubt, was my Sergeant Pepper bringing to the black-and-white monotone Bush-Cheney-Rove America his music. Seven years of disappointment watching Bush reverse the small starts we had made under Clinton in doing something to avoid the coming collapse of the world's ecosystem, the 50% worldwide species extinction expected in the next few decades accelerating and thus the image of Bush as "What Me Worry" Alfred E. Neumann of Mad Magazine fame, sitting behind the wheel of the bus with all life on the planet aboard, gleefully singing songs, dancing, and pressing the accelerator down so as to more rapidly arrive at the cliff that'll be the end for all life, as he puts the poor in prison, and creates massive giveaways for the rich, so they will have even more power in putting out misinformation on global warming and the environmental crisis that will (like Exxon was found to have done) increase their profits in the short term as it confuses people and places doubts in the minds of the would be noble spirits, heroes, and truth-tellers that our crisis requires yesterday for our world to have a chance.
Yet I saw no Sixties-style rage in the streets. Of the young people, I saw them firmly enthralled with the Matrix view (again) that getting a good job with a major corporation was their route to happiness in life. (So many sad children, with Dad's who don't know how to have a heart, give advice, instead of love, and control, instead of respect hoping that Big Daddy corporation will take care of them.) So my mind was bleak as Blue Meanies land.
I listened to Will Oldham. I listened also to Scout Niblett also, who has that same authenticity and fearless self-revelation, and who I've covered in other several other pieces, explaining the power of her music, her authenticity, and the incredible new worlds opened by her unique contributions. And others from the genre that is called Indie, for Independent, meaning, I guess, that they'd rather do their music than get signed to a label. (Authenticity.) I gradually began to realize that the generation that was going to accept the baton that my generation has been waiting to pass on exists, far more than I realized. I was looking in the streets, when they were all on the internet making their connections, learning, and sharing. Subsequently Obama proved that that was where the energy that formerly would have been in the streets was to be found, and actually having greater impact in that medium than any street demonstrations. I actually felt with glee, the words to one of Scout's songs "This Fool Can Die Now," as I felt that the generation I'd hoped would come was already here.
But Will Oldham is the elder, the prolific, the groundbreaker, and the vulnerable soul that gets to the truth and gets it out there faster than anyone. I'm talking about personal truth. So it was that night that Sergeant Pepper aka Will Oldham brought joy, hope, and happiness back into my heart. Hope and color came back to my world, as I committed myself to lend my hand too, knowing we had a generation of strong fearless, noble though imperfect, souls arising in the world and already taking the first big steps in revolutionary change, daring to be themselves… finally, that value… realized and understood. I stayed up all night and listened and my grey skies became other-worldly beautiful mindscapes. I knew that a generation with this much creative vision might have the stuff to face the biggest challenge this planet has ever faced.
Having put my worries to rest, I just let the music take me. Now, I wasn't one of my generation to do much with LSD, being too aware of the horrible punishing childhood I'd had as the child of parents who basically raised me to be an extra worker and did not have the capacity to love. No, I took the route John Lennon took -- primal therapy -- and it saved my life. It also taught me truths, discovered the mystic way, by looking within, that no one else was getting, though they had the keys that made all external knowledge not truly understandable. So my path, which included rebirthing, and Holotropic Breathwork, developed by Stanislav Grof, M.D. the preeminent researcher into the use of LSD as an aid to psychotherapy many decades ago in Czechoslovakia. He developed Holotropic Breathwork as a non-drug technique to expand consciousness and to get the benefits of LSD without using any drug.
My point: I have had plenty of experience in "Consciousness Expansion" -- of all shapes, sizes, and varieties. Interesting to note right now that one of the main catalysts of Grof's nondrug technique for expanding consciousness is music… evocative music… music that touches the heart, soul, the feelings… that is powerful in stirring up the stuff inside that most folks think is more convenient to keep carefully held in check, ignored, and put aside.
But of course we know differently, that that is what the Blue Meanies would wish of us so that we will be soulless and able to be manipulated. I state all this to as indications of the power of Will Oldham's music; and to make clear that, because of my personal experiences, when I used the words "consciousness expanding" to describe his music I did it with the firm conviction of a lifetime of experience; which is important because most people would not be able to apply it with the understanding I have, and so would be thought to be using it ignorantly, flippantly, or to sound provocative. And I feel I owe it to anyone who has read this far to provide as much clarity as possible on the ways I am using the words to describe my experience. The reader deserves to be clued in as much as possible – giving my background, for example, so that they might decide the degree of weight to give to the words I use. It occurs to me, for example, that without this understanding the reader might be left confused as to whether I was someone prone to couch experiences poetically, and therefore should be taken in that light, or whether, as is the case, I am describing actual facts and experiences – my feelings being the facts. My poetic sounding words are the only ways I can describe experiences that have no physical components to them, just inner ones. But the analogies I use are the best equivalents to the actual feelings I experienced, and I feel they provide the best entry into my experience, to get at least the most accurate sense that one can, of something that will never be able to expressed exactly in words. That being said, my actions and feelings of that night should provide at least the evidence to conclude that, at least for me, the music had a power on a scale or of a dimension that was unlike any other, for me, in music.
For indeed I did stay awake all night listening to his music (mostly). And this is coming from a person who, as I've indicated, dedicated his life (it's been 38 years now since I had my first natural altered state of consciousness -- a primal -- which I had alone and totally naturally, no drugs of any kind.
Yet this is the effect that Will Oldham's music had on this one person in one night:
I came away from my first journey into the aurally induced mindscape of the Will Oldham universe feeling myself reincarnated "reformatted" one might say these days, within some mysterious, profound vision, which less than a day earlier I would have considered alien. But now I looked around at the world that someone, who used to call himself "me," saw as a familiar world but only a day ago. But now, after that night it is seen as an alien one; not in a negative or threatening sense, but in the sense of an astronaut coming back to his home planet after many years and after seeing many strange worlds, and thinking, "my this place, once so familiar and real, in fact the definition of real, why, so many other realities, also real, this seems strange. I don't have a home here since my sense of home includes so much more than this."
But though strange, this world now seen, I also feel immeasurably blessed in my having learned of its Jacob's Ladder-like opening onto this expansive new universe of infinite delicious and wonderfully profound yet firmer-than-Earth mysteries as opened inside my mind through Oldham's musical alchemy.
Consciousness Expansion, you bet! I would not wish to ever see Reality in that smaller way I'd gotten used to. No. How to describe it then:
I can only say I felt like the first fish who ever made it out of water to dry land and suddenly knew without a doubt he would never again experience his life underwater with the same naïve overestimation.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
TIME CAPSULE: A pre-Bush Prophecy, from September 21st, 2000, of What We Could Expect He’d Leave Us – Eerily Accurate
An Unearthed, Un-Retouched Premonition – Cogent and Prophetic? Or Eerie, Unfathomable?
Primal Spirit: The Deeper Wave of the New Age
http://www.geocities.com/sillymickel/authenticity.html
I recently unearthed, March 9, 2009, 9:49am, three never finished drafts of an article I intended to publish on my website prior to the 2000 Presidential election. Stuffed and interwoven among the electrons of the backups of old computers, I had completely forgotten ever having written any of it. Engulfed, indeed, pushed around and battered within the intensity and sharpness of recent political, geopolitical, and economic and financial forces, I was shocked to see the words, written almost a decade earlier, which, desperately intoning, warned of specific dire happenings should George W. Bush be elected. For it seemed those exact words, of so long ago, had just been lifted from the headlines and front pages of today's daily news.
Prophetic? Eerie? I don't know quite what to make of it. It certainly disturbed me and got me to wondering, and then to writing. Perhaps now, as I lay before us the thoughts that I couldn't help but ponder, and alongside them the thoughts expressed in the writings of that little remembered time, you and I, just might, perhaps in ways that we would never even be able to express to each other, nevertheless find revealed to us something totally unexpected, maybe even wonderful. By looking closely, we might just get a peek beyond life's veil surround; we have here the chance of capturing a glimpse beyond or into that mystery that has been said to be just beyond our limited senses, that place of awe and odd activity, a mere membrane away from the normal, which mystics, sensitives, seers, and sublime artists, claim to sense and sometimes speak. Take that as you will; still there's no denying the fascination and fixation that these awesome unknowables held for the likes of Einstein and William James, pinnacles of rationality to the world, yet regarding these things in their attempts to communicate them only ecstatic and rhapsodic language would do, and even at that, they would claim they could not come near what they were intuiting. So, here, perhaps, is just that kind of rare opportunity, rare for ordinary people, for getting such a glimpse of that sensed but unseen reality beyond the common-sensical one, perhaps a keyhole into Mystery itself. Certainly possible all this, yet I have to be extremely careful to note that I was hardly the only one thinking these thoughts nine years ago (the most recent dates on them are 8/19 and9/21/2000).
It saddens me what could have been. Reading it, I am stunned by how we've managed to vanquish from our minds and our media the insane, chaotic, and truly awful outlines of our times, as the events of the last nine years crept daily into our lives and world and shaped them and it in drastic ways that we can discern only by the contrast. These unpolished cat-scans of a mind and time provide such a contrast, stark and shocking.
So these writings I will reproduce here for your consideration. However do keep in mind the date on the upcoming writing. The last date this piece was even touched was, as determined by the "date modified" figure, exactly 8/19/20000, at 9:41pm. That date, so long ago in my memory, really shocked me, especially in terms of the parallels with events today that were equally salient then. The entire piece is on the long side, I'm sorry to say, but if you, like me, are a real political junky, I think you'll find a lot of meaty stuff. Substantial and important zeitgeists of that time are I believe made palpable. Considering what is going on right now in our political arenas, it may seem so tangible that you may forget that it is not about today. So I must stress that in no way, even slightly, was this writing altered.
Okay, my bad. I feel the need to pause here and to make the most sincere qualification about what I'm attempting to show and how I'm insisting on garnering the utmost I can of integrity and credibility for this investigation. So, we pause for this qualification: Let there be no misunderstanding of what is written and why it is included, editing incomplete. First, it reads pretty well, as is, as it had a good deal of editing, before it fell through the cracks, as other things came into my life and kept me from getting back to it. But it seems a little choppiness or even confusion around certain phrasings is far superior than to have its authenticity as being the exact creation of that mind of nine years in the past at all questioned.
I've already related about my astonished feelings at having come across this long forgotten piece of writing. But, you see, I knew I hadn't seen or even remembered writing this. I knew that without question. For some people that might be difficult to believe, but then I doubt that many of those have reached the age of 58, like I have. No, I'm not claiming, as people laughingly say when, being older, they forget something that they're having a "senior moment." For me, it really seems -- although this is also meant to be more humorous than exact scientifically -- but it really seems that I've only got so much room on the old hard drive up there, and year after year, decade after decade, of piling in more and more information on increasingly diverse subjects, to boot, it seems to me, just sort of requires that one has to "delete" some of the older files; there's not even enough room to archive them. This is not as silly as it might first seem, for I don't believe a generation has ever existed of humans who have had more information, changes, and so on, thrown at them over the course of a lifetime, requiring them to learn it or else to slip back in the ranks, not be able to compete on a par, as not even the worst consequence.
I won't get into the need to stay on top of ever more complex material to just keep one's house, to not have one's money dribble away in complex investments, or even to keep from being taken to the cleaners by the IRS because of tax codes that are so meticulously structured to suit an array of special interests, rather than structured for fairness for all and simplicity. Don't get me started.
The point is, you know, just from an overheated outpouring of information coming out of and turbo-charged by the cyber revolution, that we all, in the course of our lifetimes, are confronted with such overwhelming change and information. It is overwhelming in itself, but tack on the fact that you don't even have a choice in the matter. The advances in technology, just to take one example, require that one learn, relearn, and then relearn something different about the same thing a few years down the line. You know that it's driven by the incredible changes in computers and the software, but it has catalyzed changes in every other area in our lives, so that everyone, no matter their job, is forced into lifelong learning just to keep up. I'm not saying anything new here, why even the American President addressed this point in his campaign when he emphasized the need for societies to have structures in place to facilitate this "life-long learning," which, as he put it, in the coming decades and with the increasing speed of changes, is going to be ever more required in order for folks to keep up and to stay in the work force as they age.
So this problem is one that was first noticed, perhaps, in the Fifties, when there was talk of the "rat race," with the image that one never could keep up. It was stunningly symbolized in the movie, "Brazil," where one character walking on a windy street is hit by one paper, then another, and they keep sticking to him, despite his fervid, then frantic attempts to get them off him. He gets frantic because the papers accumulate so much that they, gradually but inexorably, cover every part of him, eventually papering over his head, then turning him into a struggling ball of paper, for all you can see; till the struggling stops, the huge ball of paper rolls around a bit on the sidewalk, and then is hit by the wind, whereupon, at first slowly, then increasingly, the papers blow away and the ball gets smaller and smaller – you keep wondering when the man will emerge – but, quite horrifically, I would say – it slowly dawns on you that the person has disappeared, who was inside the overwhelming mountain of paper (for paper, just substitute information). And the papers, you see, are all eventually taken up by the wind and blown away – one last tiny paper tornado swirling on the sidewalk, then it too dissipates leaving . . . nothing. Can't tell you how many times I felt like that! Can you dig it?
So, however you look at it, I neither remembered, but I also did not want to change a thing, and I needed to show that I didn't, so that I would be believed on this entire premise. As it will become clearer, the fact that this could have been written and certain things foreseen is not just an anomaly, nor is it an ego trip. You will see it goes against a particular mindset that we've been led to believe over the last eight years is all that can be expected of us humans, even when we somehow rise to the highest positions in a government.
I've already related about my astonished feelings at having come across this long forgotten piece of writing. I repeat that it will be reproduced exactly as found, without even changing obvious typos or even confusions of grammar. The least I could do would be to do all I could to avoid any suspicion that it was somehow tainted or, god forbid, that anything was added, that any wording coming out of today's media was included to bolster my case.
Ultimately you can choose to be suspicious of its validity, but I can only do what I can to allay as much suspicion as possible. I know that basically you only have my word on this. I can only say that I feel no need to puff myself up nor do I care if you don't see what I think is obviously there. And that's the thing, you see. If you suspect its validity, then the things that it has to teach us and the illumination that came to me, will be lost on any one too suspicious. But then, getting back to Earth now, for what purpose would I pull such a stunt!? After all this is not a high-stakes ploy. What would I be gaining by lying? I could have written this up without bringing in this document, too. So do what you will. I'm convinced that a little common sense will reveal to most folks that there's little gained by any contrivance on my part, and that, when you hear the things that this incident provoked in my awareness, I think you will not think them anything but reasonable on their own merits. The document is just a convenient mirror in which we can see things that we mostly know, and here's the point, that somehow we have been taught to forget, lately, mostly without our realizing it, and since intentional, why it would be done.
At any rate, I certainly thought at first that I was reading something about the current collapse when I read what I had written in early 2000. I think I've said way too much without providing some meat – what kinds of things did I find? OK, in mid-2000, long before Bush was put in power and had a chance to show anything at all of what kind of President he would be, I wrote these words concerning what I thought would be the result of a George W. Bush getting elected:
I believe we are in grave danger of losing, not just an election, not just a Supreme Court, not just our environment, not just our good economy, not just our recent relative peace in the world but things far worse than those horrors. I believe we are in danger of losing all hope of maintaining, let alone progressing, in the freedoms and privileges that we take for granted.
That was my fear nine years ago. But just in the last few weeks, I'm hearing such things, which, now knowing what I had said, and no doubt felt and thought more extensively about than what I actually put on paper; and not being Nostradamus, I'm saying that obviously my mindset was not unique and was shared, I know among many of my friends and colleagues, at that time, and probably even far beyond that.
So, when I'm currently hearing these comprehensive evaluations and calculations in recent books by scholars, with enough clout and credibility to be broadcast on the mainstream and from several sources that a) the government under George W. Bush was run essentially like a dictatorship, by any definition of that. That we lost our democratic rights, among so much else, and the only thing that kept us from realizing this was the resistance by media and the populace to be able to face such a horrific prospect. So, basically, until it was over, hardly was there anyone with the courage to look squarely at what he was doing and has done and add it up; that is, until he was out of office. People who have lived under dictatorships can I'm sure understand that reluctance to point out such an horrific prospect while still under the regime's thumb!
And, the second thing I heard was the calculations of a scholar, who, adding up the damage left behind in America – economically for the most part, but otherwise as well -- that there was no way, ever again, that America could expect to have again the relative prosperity, opportunities for the majority, not to mention standard of living, and so much more. Essentially this person was saying that George W. Bush had managed to so "kneecap" America during his short (though long they seemed) eight years that America would never ever recover. An astonishing assessment, echoing like the announcement of the fall of the Roman Empire.
We haven't always had the best of Presidents, but this person's thesis, in the midst of the dire things coming out, and they continue to pile up, is being widely considered – while hoping him wrong, people are not discounting that he may be the only one getting it right, for it cannot be denied that few are brave enough or have strong enough stomachs to actually go piece by piece through the wreckage and add it all up and place it alongside the best assessments of America's needs and responsibilities in the decades coming.
So it is with these things in my mind that I read that statement about Bush leaving a legacy from which America will never recover, which I had written 9 years ago and then forgot. But you are not me, and so the explication as well as need to completely leave the document as I found it, incomplete sentences and all. It is reproduced exactly below, without even changing obvious typos or even confusions of grammar. For I did not want anything to taint or draw suspicion around what you mostly have to take my word on. I can only say that I feel no need to puff myself up nor do I care if you don't see what I think is obviously there.
But still thought I'd give my best case possible to you for my credibility. For if I garner a bit of that, the reader just might see and understand the astonishment that I felt.
This might seem to be overdoing it, but I've noticed that we live in a time where those in power, making these huge blunders, like to excuse themselves by saying "Well, no one, before the fact, had ever considered for a moment that people would take planes and crash them into buildings," for example. For that one, former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. It's a statement she has made since 9-11, and even had repeated it in her last days in office. Never mind the well-known, and widely reported Intelligence that was released after 9-11 that had concluded that Obama determined to strike in America using planes to crash into buildings, statements given to the American government many months before the catastrophe and which Rice herself is known to have been aware of months before the crashes, and which journalists record her having little interest in, despite several attempts at briefing her on it. And she is only one who makes the same claim, denying the warnings (the Intelligence was the most damning, in that it was specific, in pointing to a lack of vigilance, and an apparent narrow ideological view which made them, apparently, not see all the evidence, required to make valid assessments. But rather they were predisposed to certain conclusions and so scanned for the pieces that supported that.
We know in retrospect that is what happened, and we know how disastrous that view was. Which is why I am writing this. It is simply high time for people who knew better to stop letting these ideologues whose very ideological bent was arguably the reason they failed so horribly, to get away with the ignorance defense. It is one thing to say that one did not oneself consider certain outcomes or possibilities, but to claim that "no one at all" ever thought these things…. Well, it is ignorance, literally, to ignore, that caused so many in power to, ideologically bent, simply see only what they wanted to see. But, proven wrong, and shown and pointed out that there had been plenty of evidence to have led one to do things differently and to get it right, and to still claim that no one else knew, is defined as lying. It may be human nature to lie after one has screwed up so badly, but it is not required of humans. And others have many times admitted they were wrong and humbly admitted their failings in not considering the very evidence in front of them. Bush's Scott McClellan is one such person, he was the Communications Director under Bush, and wrote a confessional book admitting that he should have known better and done differently.
No, it is too damn easy to say "human nature." People in such positions should, let us say, we would hope, have a tad more of the noble in them, a bit more integrity not less, or they shouldn't be allowed to take such positions, which require at least the integrity and nobility to be working for the betterment, protections, and the increase of all of Americans, over against one's own interests; and need I say over against one's egotistical desire to try out on the world stage some ideological theory. Else, hell, there's lots of folks – many are Democrats – who would have tried a lot harder under the same circumstances. So, it strikes me as more than arrogant for people who created these situations out of their own ignorance, greed, and so on, to excuse themselves by basically painting everyone else with the same brush.
No, Rice and Bush and Cheney, who all engage regularly in this, "No one could have known" excuse, do not have the right, after being given (or after having taken) the reins of the most powerful governmental forces, to place themselves as innocent and humanly unknowing just like everyone else, as they perpetrated the kinds of deeds of evil that they were so ready to decry, and put down, in others, and now to escape their mistakes and their ideologically driven lapses of such consequence, to be making themselves feel superior and safe by saying, essentially, anyone in the same situation would have come to the same conclusion. Well, the facts are, as I will be pointing out again and again, that when you make the conscious decision to eliminate contrary points of view, even when there are more of them than support your bent, and having ignored reports, stifled opposition, and insulated one within a group of monolithic true-believers; all while that entire America and the world is requiring you to get it right; NO, when you basically set it up so that, after hearing things you don't want to hear, you make damn sure that the only people that are around or will even be allowed in (Bush took it so far as to never allow anyone even in one of his town hall meetings to attend if they were not fully on his side), it seems to me, to be more than arrogance, I don't know, to say that, having drawn one's circle so small, and against the better interests of the American people that you would at least, having been given the job, to do it as well as any small businessperson and simply find out everything one can before making a decision..
But now, why would it be? Why this need to go so far in denying the facts? Why the need, which as pointed out existed during that long period where it became increasingly clear that the Administration had gotten so many things wrong for lack of "doing one's homework" that so many of the Bushies, like Rice, also felt this ignoble need to excuse themselves of their mistakes not saying they'd done wrong but, amazingly, adopting and engaging in the same kinds of excuses of common criminals, even a mass murderer to explain one's failings. For as Charles Manson used to like to say, "how do you know what you would have done if you'd been in my shoes? How do you know that you'd not come to the same conclusions and actions after experiencing and learning what I did?" And adding, "What I'm saying is that all you smug people, thinking you're so above the rest of us and so incapable of continually assert how good you are and to exaggerate with fake loathing and revulsion how different you are from these others? Why, except that you are aware of having some of these things inside yourself, a little bit of Manson, or Bundy, or whatever? You are aware of these tugs and pulls and so your protestations aren't they mainly to try to fight back those things?" And here he would laugh, "You see, what you people don't want to admit is that we are all alike on the inside; and that includes the evil. That also includes the good, which you would deny that I have. In fact, you do not want to know that you could as easily done this as I did, under the correct circumstances."
While, there may be some truth in what Manson and criminals like him have claimed, psychologically speaking and his pointing to hypocrisy is certainly often merited, still he is talking about the human psychology and the imperfections of them. One can easily grant that humans are not perfect, but that does not mean that we'd all become killers in the same circumstances. That is something one cannot know. But what we do know is that different people can be in a particular situation and react completely differently: one may act nobly, even heroically; another may act cowardly, finding excuses, blaming others.
What I'm saying it that is unseemly to an nth degree to hear those who have taken over our government through their claims to be better, be smarter and more able, and to be more ethical – and would that include a little integrity, even nobility of character. So for these people, who have driven this country into the ground, after claiming higher ethics, character, morality, all the rest, than their opponents, indeed, so high as to warrant their receiving the job of most responsibility and requiring the most integrity than any other one in the world. So then, after all that sales pitch at the beginning their excuse for screwing up is essentially that they were just the average Joe, the C – student, who didn't like homework, and it being "so hard," that they made common mistakes – one's that anyone would make. Well, 1) EVERYONE DID NOT MAKE THESE MISTAKES! And you showed yourself too incompetent in not even listening to them, and 2) if you're so common, then how dare you place yourself above everyone else and lie about your character and so on. If you were lying about all that as a political ploy just to win. .. so that you could, what, have power? Help your friends and yourself become enriched, or whatever? Well the lives of all humans on this planet are affected by the decisions of that office. And if your intent was a selfish one, then the whole world suffered, for it was a job for them that you were hired to do. Not doing your job, and lying to the American public to get the job, is more than unethical. It becomes treason when the office is used to extort from the American taxpayers, huge amounts of money to give to their rich friends and to corporations with ties to the administration like Halliburton, who made money hand-over-fist with no-bid contracts. No, that kind of stuff is not the stuff of mistakes but if intentional. It is using the highest office of the land, and taking the hopes of us all, from the little girl who wants to see her Daddy again, the many languishing in hospitals for lack of health care …. The list is endless … it is assuming to be their hero, while spending one's time dismantling the government and the benefits it provides for us all, which for several hundred years have been worked out. And for one administration to trash and plunder that government for its own selfish ends is not a matter of "I didn't think of that before." No, it sounds like the excuses of criminals because that is what this recent bunch actually were.
So that's an example of what I'm getting at, which is that, despite so many denials, especially by the people in power and their lackeys in the media – all claiming that they could not foresee this, could not foresee that, that this was truly unprecedented, and that nobody could ever have seen such and such coming. What I'm proposing is that in fact many did see many things coming, not just unheard of and powerless me (although isn't it significant that even I could pick up on certain things), that it was not a lack of astute people, but let us say an intentional leaving out of the conversation of policy, any and all minds who could have and would have advised more correctly and would have prevented much if not all that has transpired and which now leaves America in a crisis to top all crises, at the worst possible time when so many other things of global significance are on the line.
(Can you say it with me, "Thanks George W. Bush for all your efforts and "hard work" which have led, your decisions and your Administration solely to blame – thank you for being "THE DECIDER!" -- to leave us in the midst of so many dire and rapidly expanding problems, so that many people are not just wondering if they will have a job or money, but that even if this planet will make it through another fifty years. So, hey, thanks for all the hard work and for relieving us and all our grandchildren of any money, and…. oh, I see, there probably won't be any planet for the little dears to live on. And everyone dead and all. Why, gosh, Mr. W., you're so smart, you probably knew that! So that's why you and your cronies went so far as to commit grand larceny even at the end, scraping the last of any money in the Treasury for the high-pressured auto trading that you had your guy Paulson, former head of Goldman Sachs before coming to take this position for you. And now we find out that none of that money went where it was intended to go and it did not change the situation but rather exacerbated it! More on that later. But just want to say how cute you are, W.. I mean, it was just, soooooo you! We heard afterwards how your guys gathered Congressional leaders and without exactly explaining how it would happen – of course Congressmen could not be expected to understand the workings of economics and high finance like a Paulson could. So, kindly Paulson and his deputies explained using analogies, how nice of them to bring it down to their level, so sweet of them. And the analogy they used was that if Congress didn't cough up the dough pronto – perhaps those weren't the exact words, my bad. But anyway, that the consequences – and tell me W. this was all you, right? – The consequences would be that of a "GLOBAL NUCLEAR MELTDOWN" (tell me, that part was you, right?) a terminal global nuclear meltdown that would (wait, I'm getting an inkling here… was this next part, Cheney's?) "End modern civilization as we know it for the foreseeable future." Wow! It gives me shivers just hearing it. I mean there ain't no auto salesman in his wildest fantasies that could come up with something so absolutely, well, disabling. You guys really took those suckers in Congress "out by the knees"! How could they have had a chance! And, boy, there's that nuclear threat again. How clever! I mean it worked to get us into a war, but this is economics. But that's my George, the W. himself, going with what he knows. And, hey, why bother coming up with anything else, that card's a winner for you, my man…. And c'mon, level with me, I just gotta know, won't tell anyone else… Was that Cheney with the "end of civilization" part? C'mon, it's got to be him, that's just sooo Darth Vader, who else could think like that. Please tell me I'm right; I feel like I know this guy and that is well just sooooo him!... )
Well that was fun. But, more seriously, we find that there was plenty of help for Bush in pulling off his Ocean's 12 caper. Take Paulson. Respected, regarded, head of Goldman Sachs, the acknowledged best and brightest of the Wall Street analysts, savvy folks who at the beginning of the banking crisis, as brokers like Merrill and Lehman were crumbling, some never to be heard again, Goldman Sachs was rumored to have come out quite well. It is said that they, when nobody else saw it coming (there's those words again), invested to protect themselves in case of a downturn; perhaps shorting or buying puts, I'm not sure. But that even struck me as rather astute as I had been doing the same thing, foreseeing a financial collapse, and not taken up with the Bush Administration's cheer-leading of its own economic policies measured in the stock market and led by CNBC analysts all, especially the slavish Kudlow and his claims that Bush had produced a near perfect "Goldilocks Economy." This he repeated over and over, even as the market slid. And when it did it was always the fault, according to Kudlow, of someone who had it out for Bush and his policies. Seriously, hearing this guy daily, salivating on and on about Bush, you'd wish they'd just a got a room.
Getting back to Goldman Sachs, however, Paulson long gone, not even leaving records of where the money went, apparently just handing it out like candy to his friends. And we were told that we just had to trust him, for it was so dire, and yet so far beyond our ability to understand. Maybe so, but then when it turned up recently that a huge chunk of that money went from Paulson to a European bank (a German one, I believe, not that that matters). And that this bank turned around and paid Goldman Sachs $16 billion. To which I can only, sarcastically (what other attitude can one have and still remain comfortable while writing!!) add, well, way-ta-go there Paulie, good job, Paulie, now that's one round about but rather effective way of collecting a debt. Makes me wonder then just whose nuclear meltdown would be in the offing, just whose civilization would end. As we will see further on, these people are and always have been seeing themselves as SO FAR ABOVE US, and they manage to convince the rest of us that they are that (just look at how they convinced Congress and are going around a second time and are succeeding again! They are SO FAR above us that they truly, and I mean this sincerely for reasons that I will get into, they truly see their fates, fortunes, and futures as equivalent with all the rest of us. I.e., and now I'm tipping my hand a bit, like kings of old who might suffer depression and soon all in the kingdom would be claiming to suffer depression too (or would be obliged to say they did?). And, by the way, this is nothing like the kind of Unity of Consciousness I speak of later. No. No. Think of this more along the lines of "We Are Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile." And more exactly it is this 25,000 year old pure and simple patriarchal authoritarian daddy power and their ability, with all their underlings depending on them for survival, to require the soul-loss and the robotic obedience of a group, each of whom know they will fare better materially (and being kept, most often, at a mere subsistence level) any improvement would be dearly competed for, and how would they compete? You might ask? Well, how dear to a king's heart is the underling who it seems so loves of the king that he also suffers whatever the king does. Now that's a pretty slavish thing, as humiliating acts of self-annihilation go, the aping that one is so in unity with the king that indeed they will suffer the same. (OK, now you say it with me, "Get a room!!").
But this point is to explain the seeming inexplicability of the power of such people, even over against that of a Congress that was trying to show some spine at that time, even though it was still dominated by Republicans, even they were having qualms of this kind of railroading, which several decried – and this is where I got it from – as seeming so much like the tactics of a slick auto salesman.
(Tell ya what, I'm going to do. You just sign this paper here; it's only got a tentative price on it, I won't hold you to it, but this will guarantee that beauty won't be scooped out from under you tomorrow morning before you've had a chance to come in. Now, I know you love that car; and, quite honestly I want to see this deal go through, because I know a good match when I see it; and that car will be great for you. Leave it to me, I'll talk to my supervisor tomorrow, I'm going out on a limb here, ya'know. But if I didn't make my customers happy, I wouldn't be happy, for that is what it's all about to me. Just sign here, next to that number, and tomorrow we'll see what we can do as far as bringing that down so it's more affordable to you. You know, I wouldn't do this for anybody else. But you strike me as a man of class. And I just know that you're not going to let some minor discrepancy or other get in the way of your getting the vehicle that someone of your stature really deserves. And that's what I'm I'll about, I'm here to serve you and to get you the car you deserve. No, don't worry about signing, it's not a contract, really. In fact, if you change your mind by tomorrow, I personally will guarantee you that I will put in any time necessary to find the one of your dreams. Now you couldn't do better than that, could you? Really now. I guess I'm just a sucker, but hey, I don't see this job as selling machines, but more like arranging marriages. Like the Matchmaker – you know "Fiddler on the Roof" – ha ha! (yea, right there anywhere, will be fine… oh, that pen not working, well here I've got plenty, in fact here have a couple, give one to your kid from me. There you go, now you're doing the smart thing. I figured you to be a smart person the first time I saw you on the lot a little while ago. Well, anyway, I know you want to get home to your family, and tell them the good news. Well, of course, we're still going to work on those figures tomorrow. Let's just say I'm pretty damn sure I can get my supervisor to see it more your way, so I'm assuming we're going to have the deal that'll make you happy. So g'won now you old charmer, before you get me to throwing in a second car in the deal just cause you're such good people. Yea, it was good getting to know you too. So I'll see you bright and early tomorrow. Oh, yeah, OK, I understand you can't get here till late afternoon, I just assumed nothing would be able to hold you back once you though of it at home. Yea, g'night…. (pause. Now salesmen yelling out a little as the man retreats.) Oh, Mr. Bonior, just one small detail, if you don't mind. Now, I know you weren't sure about that undercoating, but I'm telling you that it'll add years to your car, and, like I said, that may be something we can throw in; and if not, well it's not that much. So d'ya want me to have that taken care of before you come in tomorrow? I can guarantee to put my best guy on it first thing in the morning, so the only think you'll have to think of is how luxurious it will be driving home in this sweetness. No, you say no? Ya sure now? I mean you look like a great couple to me (chuckle). Not getting cold feet at the altar are you? (chuckle, chuckle) You're sure you don't want it, not yet. Okay, tell you what I'm going to do. You ARE a hard bargainer, darn you. (he he). Look I'll put my best guy on it, he comes in at 8am. I really think that when you leave here you're going to want to take this car away tomorrow, not another day. Now, now, relax; I heard you, just let me finish. I've been in this business a long time and by this point I hardly ever, if that, miss one of these "love at first sight" affairs I saw tonight. So, hear me out, it'll be the best deal of your life, call it my "wedding gift": Like I said I'll put my guy on it in the morning. But if you call and let me know before that, well, then I'll just take him off it, and crack it up to I just didn't know you as well as I thought I did. On the other hand, here's my "gift," let me have it put on for you and – like I said I can probably get the cost completely waived – but let's say I can only can half of it waived. Well, I'll personally split the difference on the remaining cost with you; take it right out of my commission. It might mean I make $5 on this deal, but what the heck. Like I said it's all about making you happy. (Mr. Bonior turns and throws up his hands and walks to his car) OK, great, sounds like we got a deal. So, see you tomorrow, you're going to be glad you came walking in her today, believe me. G'night again.)
Back to the astonishing "Paulsie" scheme, as one person astutely put it, when anyone tells me I have to sign on the dotted line that day, or else . . . well, never once has a situation like that turned out right. Someone, I don't remember who, was way ahead of everyone else. He used the word, "extortion." We now find out, only in the last few weeks, how close to or exactly like extortion have been some of the tactics of the TARP money's recipients toward the very Congress that provided them the money.
Once again, no matter the situation, and despite the outcries of the American Republican Administration, who claimed to have encountered one after another of unforeseen and unprecedented events, no one ever dreamed could happen before. Such was always the refrain. In case I need to use an example or two to remind some readers of the prevalence of that claim and the absurdity of it as well: We see, Katrina, the unholy disaster wrought by that hurricane. Louisiana is devastated, particularly New Orleans. The administration responds so horribly that the death toll is eventually no longer being announced in the media. Claims that it might be in the thousands were quelled by daily counts that only slowly recovered the dead, so that as the toll rose into the teens and 20s and u to 50, it was telling all of us listening that it may not have been as bad as we thought in terms of the loss of life. Not so, actually, as I told my wife, many people died in their attics, inside their homes, and they haven't even gotten to those neighborhoods. Indeed, I listened and only heard one time, years later and as an afterthought how several thousand had indeed been killed in that horrible flood. So, two things we notice in this example. The subtle way the media keeps anger at the administration in check by downplaying the horror. They couldn't have done it any better had they been directly in the payroll of the government as the forces are who obeyed Bush's commands to not let there be any TV coverage of Iraqi soldiers returning home in pine boxes and that even the graveyards were not to allow open caskets. So there is this collusion that is hard to understand. We'll look at that a little later. But, the inane refrain is always, and everywhere, and loudly proclaimed on all the airways, the Republican lackeys, along with Bush himself, proclaiming, Bush, in an innocent voice: "Who would have thought the levees would breach? This is horrible for the families, and blah, blah, blah, (but now back to covering my ass again:) We had fully prepared for a big storm, but no on predicted the breach of the levees." There is no euphemism for that kind of outright lie, and he deserves no covering up from anyone; he's had too much already. No, indeed, I myself listened to storm reports over and over again for three days preceding landfall and sure enough, there was that one thing that was of concern to all: that the levees would breach. It was described what a devastation that would be; New Orleans being like a bowl, with much of it below sea level so a breach would not flow back out on its own. More was said: how the levees had been a cause of much concern for years prior to the storm as those in the city knew that they needed work and strengthening in a big way, for they knew that if the big one hit, it would be about as devastating as it turned out to be. But we here from Bush: no one expected the levees to breach. Truly astonishing was the degree of lying that Bush – Cheney and others in that administration proclaimed, and which, despite even the media making at least some minimal amount of noise about certain things not being exactly congruent with certain facts, and so on (one could do a great study of euphemisms for the many and varied ways that the media covered Republican comments without ever, not once using the word lie, or liar.
I promised two examples, so how about the gem I discussed earlier in which Condoleezza Rice, year after year, takes refuge in this idea that "No one could have foreseen terrorists using planes to crash into buildings," despite specific warnings delivered to the U.S. and specifically brought to her attention, which said exactly that.
But remember, when one meticulously surrounds oneself with only true believers, and fills posts with of importance with people with questionable theology degrees, and routinely stifles dissent (as was viciously done to Valerie Pflame to get back at Joe Wilson's speaking out), then how will you ever get any information except that which you already know; or better yet, how will you every learn anything that does not in fact reinforce your beliefs, so how will you learn anything different that you might need to learn?
Let's back off from the administration a bit, as I want to now show an example of how this exact same mindset was coming out in the mainstream media, particularly in regards to the crashing of the stock market. This idea that nobody knew or could have prevented the debacles we've seen, we've seen not only in Republican government, but seems to be the common denominator among those who perpetrated the things that have led to our calamity. A big part of this occurred on Wall Street; and since I've been an active trader, on-line, off and on, since 1996, I've watched this whole thing unfold. I can only say, that, tuned in every day, and simply being aware of certain patterns of reporting, I could see deep trouble was coming, which I'll get into in a minute. First, a salient example of the attitude expressed above ("nobody could have imagined…") being used also on Wall Street as an example.
I vividly remember an event I remember hearing on the financial news in America, on CNBC one day, sometime last fall. One of the expert trader/commentators – a person I'd often seen on the show -- was being interviewed on the floor of the actual exchange, seeming surrounded by evidence of the carnage; there were actual strewn papers and such, just like in the old days, as I remember it, as stocks were tumbling (again!) with such rapidity that even the old call out system was being implemented, for some reason – for certain financial instruments anyway. And there had been the confusion and the outcries, and yes, even the panic that one would expect to see in an old movie about the Stock market Crash. In the midst of this all, this trader/expert was asked by the CNBC interviewer, about his take on the scary and unprecedented retreat from stocks and those days of multi hundred point losses, one after the other (think back to October, for one example). This elderly obviously seasoned personality seemed to balloon out several sizes of his suit, in his sheer incomprehension and his near perfect confusion. Raising his voicing, a little more squeaky and almost embarrassed, he yet proclaimed as if written on tablets first, how "all the traders have lost money," and then "Nobody's doing OK... " But his afterthought hit me like a spear: He pleaded, "I mean who last year at this time foresaw anything like this coming…I mean," he said "anything at all, at all, like this coming up?"
At home, There was no way to restrain the howl of laughter that triggered in my, while at the exact same time, I experienced this sharp pain in my belly, like I'd been stuck, well and good, by a spear. I couldn't believe this "expert's comment. I pondered, Is it funny, or horrible, that I had been making money hand over fist as I kept shorting the market, buying only puts, having fully expected this crash ever since Bush had put in his tax cuts for the rich policy in the first year of office. I expected it to come near the end of his second term, like had happened to Reagan who had employed the same asinine throw money at the rich (so they won't spend it to create jobs, but instead will buy yachts and – one big rage of the Reagan era – buy expensive art, which they bid through the roof, making headlines in those days, as one art object after another would break a new record. At the time, we all thought: Great idea, Ron, baby. Now you just tell me how money locked up in art will somehow create jobs and tinkle down on the poor.
Yet here, only twenty years later, I see this seasoned elderly guy, -- obviously he'd seen more than I could ever have – of the workings of Wall Street. Yet he had not had a clue that this downturn could happen, nor apparently, had anyone, any trader, or any CNBC talking head, seen a thing. (Where were they 20 years ago, I wondered.) Still, lowly me, is it because I'm a Democrat? Lowly me, well I did I remember the way Reagan's "Robin-Hood-in-reverse" economics created a great recession, which brought Bill Clinton to power, incidentally, but also how everyone was alarmed at the size of the National Debt, which, during Reagan-Bush I, had more than tripled. And my mentors in the market, the ones I picked who were not afraid to look squarely at the fundamentals and who were not Republican cheerleaders or in bed with the interests we see now running for the exits like a bunch of cockroaches when the light is turned on.
I also watched as these Republican-speaking mouthpieces for the rich and for the economics of greed were more and more the only voices being heard when the Mr. Ed chart markings of the DOW began that nodding, as if to say, "I'm weary of being artificially propped up, Wil-ber! I just want to lie down, to let my head hang low, to rest, to not have to confirm self-serving theories of rich people, using their wealth to make the biased and twisted thinking of their underlings to be sounded endlessly above the din of the moaning masses as year after year they see their costs going up, wages stagnating, and their efforts, doubled, tripled, and beyond without being able to get their heads above it. You see, Wilber, I'm tired of doing your bidding for reasons bigger, I think much bigger, than just it being wrong and that this thievery perpetrated on the helpless is more feudal than economic, despite the big smokescreen of the god of capitalism or the supposed "free market." No, Wil-ber. And no matter how funny it might seem to you and your friends . . . this pulling off of a prank, once again, of stealing from the poor, as you would see it, just a hilarious juvenile prank, like locking up a freshman in his own locker. I can hear you laughing, but as much as I think that cruel it is still not the really big reason I'm rebelling.
You see, Wilber, what's been done again is so much exactly as its always been; no matter the talk of democracy or progress. It might as well be a time of kings and nobles, or any time or place in the past; there has always been "strong men" or a "strong man," at the center of human suffering. This story is the same old story of the rich making up rules to suit themselves that has been going on ever since humans stopped wandering and began living in stable groupings that allowed some men gather more things about them than others. For when your kind were nomads and gatherers, more gypsy-like and free-spirited and trusting in the invisible forces to be kind and to provide whatever one really needed; I'm saying that as wanderers and nomads, no one of your kind wanted to "own" very much for it then had to be carried ever after; hardly worth the burden. Much more like the other beings on this globe, like my own kind you were then.
But then there was that fear that came over your species, unlike anything ever before seen among the rest of us creatures of God. A fear of uncertainty, quite strange. For we think it joyful to not know what the future will bring, and believing in a higher forces that really ARE good and loving, we expect to be loved and blessed and gifted with whatever fate the future brings, knowing there is nothing that is not a product of that consciousness of All, which is both good, for All, and perfect, beyond what mere creatures can know in the moment. So we are happy with our lot, never understanding why your kind chose to forego the glorious, blessed lives you had at one time: There was in the beginning such a closeness with what you call divinity that we saw you happy and playful as little babies when Mama plays peek-a-boo behind a towel or handkerchief. Even you know how the little child is alternately a little distressed – where did Mama go? – and then when Mama reappears from behind the veil, smiling, loving, happy, and saying "peek-a-boo, I love you," why the squeals of happiness are the greater for having been fooled into thinking something distressing was happening but wasn't. That is the way your kind, we have observed for the as long as we were aware of your kind . . . that is the way that we have seen your Mama's teach their children that Mama will always be there, even when she seems not to be. And this learning is precious to the child, for it gives the baby a foundation of certainty that love is around even when not seen.
And isn't it obvious that it was a teaching meant to be about more than the protection of mothers. Wilber, Wil-ber, that learning was so much like the way we learn, falling down but finding there is always love around and that we will be up again and back in the mix, if we just let the many blessednesses around us come to give us what's necessary, always, and we know there can be only one source for that constant love and attention, a spirit of love and perfection, always on our side, teaching and guiding and leading us, often in spite of ourselves! For like Mama, it knows the truth, and we do not. So we trust it. This loving perfection spirit we don't see with our eyes but feel in our muscles and heart.
But not your kind. Why, we've observed with increasing astonishment as little by little and then more and more, in dribs and drabs, your kind forgot the joy of the freedom that can only be felt in the simplicity of owning little, and therefore the complete trust that, ever were one to throw oneself over a cliff, we would be caught and risen up by invisible hands, if it were not part of the perfection and goodness of the Thing As a Whole that we should suffer and die at that moment. So sad. I hear your kind saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Well you have no idea what a knock down, roll on your belly howler that is for us to hear. I mean, this species, Humans, ha! That is seriously as funny as what you've recently been telling me about these political sorts, you called them Republicans; only a few months after the election and even less after a huge giveaway of treasure to your kind, you and your rich friends, well, here they are decrying such help to an incredible number of people who actually really need it, much more than was helped a few months ago. And these sorts are claiming that it is the Democrats, finally in power after being left to stew in silence on the peripheries of government for eight long years, and only to be brought in on any issues of importance when these lackeys of the rich, the Republicans, wanted cover for what they suspected, or knew, was wrong. The Iraqi war, for example. And these powerless representatives of the not well-heeled were treated like servants, only let into the dining room, when the food was questionable and what was needed is someone to be the guinea pig. Sad that most of them never saw that they were never ever called because of their expertise, or to contribute, but always, always to be lied to and manipulated. And your kind being so very, well that's what I'm getting to that makes you all so different in fact. Your kind being so desperately fearful of not being liked, so desperately wanting to be noticed and even applauded. What the heck is that, Wil-ber??!!
Well, whatever it is, it is the source of shame for your kind: your people, Wilber, will sell out and give in and let themselves be manipulated and used, if only given a few words that are kind or that make them feel like they belong, therefore are special and better. Which is curious to us. For us, we are noble and will do only what is in keeping with our principles. You can cage and break us, but as you see now, Wilber, I've never given over to you my inner sense of things, I've never wanted to be like you and to think like you or to value the things that you value. Hardly. Sure I can speak your language, but you don't own my tongue, even less so my thoughts. Yet how easily your kind is duped. And why? Well, we see that is has to do with that thing you did long ago when you stopped being trusting in this amazing and wonderful and loving Thing within which we all live and are a part of it. Since we know that, we need nothing from another, not from another creature, or horse, and certainly not from a human, except when you make us dependent on you by cutting us off from that life of freedom where the Thing of IT All blesses us. But, no mind, we have come to realize that so great and so Perfect is that within which we all move and have our existence that even in these conditions of captivity and enslavement, there also is that Thing That Undergirds and Loves and Supports us all. So we do not trust Humans to take care of us. That's a joke considering your unbelievable inability to even take very good care of yourself . . . again that oddness about your kind. No we trust in That Thing in Which we Live to have made even contrary, forgetful, and self-centered Humans to give us exactly what is needed for us to grow and learn in the path laid out by that Perfection, which we feel in our muscles, as I said. And we find that even your cantankerous nature, when it causes a forgetfulness or denial of us, that too is what we need at that moment, but we never feel afraid that it will always be like that. And so we feel a part of something wonderful and belonging to something far greater and gooder than we can even imagine, no matter what our physical lot is. So we feel upheld, blessed, and noble.
Now, Wil-ber, I know you don't want to hear this; I certainly expected that as, again that is one of those things that characterize your species making it different from all others – that is, your unbelievably strange ability to shut the truth out of your mind so that you can hold strange, actually quite infantile ideas. And we notice that a big reason that you do so is to get something from others: we see some of you throwing away truth for money, position, closeness to power. Obviously we don't even know what it's like to what such things. Even "closeness to power": When you feel as we do that you can never be any closer – you are already so close as to be in it, swimming in it, not even knowing the difference between it and you and It – to the greatest, in fact only Power there Is, the Source of All and the as well as All Manifestation being equally one with It, including oneself. So again, we see that your pathetic and slavish desire for the regard of others is enough for many of your kind to give up their own Truths, which is the things they know from direct Experience. So if a position or regard or money is available, only that one must repeat and even belief, over against one's own experience, the beliefs and thoughts of a more powerful person, we are shocked at how your kind is able to split their mind in two, or is it more than that after a while, pieces and to be able to convince themselves even that certain things they assuredly experienced, well, they just didn't happen, if it makes it better for them to think that. In fact, I'll let you in on a secret, Wilber, while your kind go puffing and strutting upon the stage of life, fully convinced that you are stars in some gigantic drama, and using truth and the only true knowledge you can ever have – that of your own lived experience – as chips in that game, as easily traded as money, well, when we are not sad and sobbing for you – well, the equivalent for us of what would be sobbing for you, take my word you wouldn't get it if I explained it – when not sad, then we can't help but just laugh. You have no idea what a comedy your species is for all the others living here. Except for one thing, and that is that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy which you most assuredly DO NOT adhere to, in fact we see you little children, you bags of dirty water, mucking with just about anything that you can get into. It is true that your kind, of course, feeling superior to everyone else go about enslaving and trying to own everything, even other beings like us. That's always been a problem for us, but we see you even enslave each other and that hasn't even stopped – your ability to shut out facts being so overdeveloped you don't even let yourselves know how many people you have in jails for doing things that most of us would not even consider crimes. We certainly, for example, don't imprison anyone, of course, but more than that we don't even judge. We are astonished to find that your kind will make criminals out of people who have ingested certain things, we would say like eating or consuming, into their bodies. Not only don't we know what others ingest, we don't want to know, and besides what a waste of joyful life it is to be watching carefully what other people do.
But your kind are able, I suppose, to do that because, as I said, ever since you got fearful and untrusting of the benevolence of the All, the Only, you began to project your own evil tendencies onto that Other and to all the rest of us. We saw you fearfully thinking that some species were going to harm you; though they hardly knew about you and cared less, but still they were unfortunate enough to have certain characteristics that meant something to some groups of you.
***
So we have it that you have not only brought us all – and this is the point I'm getting to that requires me to speak whether you hear me or not – not only brought us all close to the point at which all of us could easily be gone, and who knows how much of the planet would be uncontaminated as well, and it could happen so quickly and so soon that even I might be forced to witness and be part of it. And for what? Again, your fear has made you hate everything outside of yourself . . . why even everything inside of yourself too, we have noticed. So that we see that an alarming number of you would accept and not think it all that tragic if your crazy ways, the source of our concern for you as well as our humor – would result in the end of everything here. This in total disregard of the billions of generations of your species and others on this planet that set entire lives to making this home of ours the best that it could be, for even that which you deem as mere creatures or animals all have had a part in that Divine Perfection and a mission of some small or large part, in sustaining and maintaining it. We did this all without your forcing us to or controlling us. But with these tendencies of your kind to be uncaring of everything except your getting relief from your fears, and in so doing, we hear that a mass extinction of nearly half of the species on this planet, in the next few decade the way I understand it, is what we are to expect, and it, of course, has already begun and is picking up momentum even as I speak. Those of you that know this, even those who are trying to awaken others to it, and doing something to educate others about what is causing it; well, heck, Wil-ber, how can your species be so utterly vain and self-centered and stupid as to not see, and if it is seen why is it not said then . . . to not comprehend the magnitude of such a thing and what it would really mean. I mean, was it your species that created, sustained, and nurtured and guided those beings for millions, in some cases, billions of years, into the performance of their unique contribution to the sustaining of this beautiful planet. Does your kind have any idea how long the perfect balance of all beings in harmony with the needs of the planet itself, any idea of just how long such an exquisite and complex perfection was in the making? More than how long, are you not aware, even as your mucking around on this planet with your heavy Caterpillar boots has devastated the and stripped bare works of exquisite ecological complexity like rainforests and such – and don't you see that it is that same Perfection beingness in which we all swim and dwell that is the force behind all that – but, you wouldn't care about that. So what I'm saying is that when these things you've done have led, as they have, to climatological disasters, floods, famines, and much else, which have cost so many of your live, still your kind does not take the hint: The hint that if your kind is actually doing so much damage as to eradicate half of the species that still remain, the products of billions of years of, using your word, "divine" orchestration. Is your kind so fearful that they would rather die and kill us all rather than come to an obvious conclusion: Wilber, in all seriousness now … hmm, I think only an analogy might give you the glimpse of what's at stake. Imagine that a doctor told you that you were infected with a disease, a disease that won't kill you just yet, but you will notice, unfortunately, that in a few decades, if not sooner, and, oh, by the way you've probably already been feeling the effects because it's already begun. Anyway, just be prepared that in roughly a few short decades you will have lost, in an entirely random manner, half of your body's parts, I mean organs, parts of organs, like glands, and so on. They will just be gone. But cheer up, you would no doubt qualify for Social Security Disability and at least wouldn't have to work!
Do you still not see? That is how we see your species. We watch in disgust as you calmly go about feasting on your own entrails while still alive. We expect that you would, Hannibal Lector style, before it is over even try a bit of your own fried brain, nicely sautéed. Do you get it yet, Wil-Ber!? This is only one scenario and with global warming it appears it may not even be the biggest danger to our survival – all of us – in an even shorter period. But again, have you no concept of how much your lives have been intertwined and dependent on all the other beings here for the entire time of your existence. What has happened to your people, so fearful as to give away their very souls, their very conscience, indeed, their very memories of their experiences and what they learned from them, for trinkets, for adulation of others who will – everyone of them – be dead, Wilber, will cease to exist along with everything else. So while your Republicans make a game out of the efforts of others to avert what is probably not able to be averted now, for how long did your kind sit and do nothing while these things were known at the highest levels of your society. I mean in astonishment we watched as a caring, concerned generation of you, over forty years ago, became aware of these things and made your entire world aware, so much so that the very things that your current President is trying now, after you so horribly took away all tools and resources from him, so that he has been handicapped from the start, but the very things he's attempting and being charged with stealing from generations to come in order to accomplish … well Wilber, not only were these things attempted by one of your Presidents over thirty years ago; a peanut farmer, mellow sort of guy with a huge engaging grin, like Obama in that way he is, not only did he try, being as aware as the youth of that time who had rallied in the streets to support us; and oh, how that touched our hearts… not only did he try to begin the process of transforming your systems to ones that would not hurt the planet, and not only did he fail as even some in his own party were so abhorrently ignorant as to buck him, instead contending that it was the short term gains of the time that should be focused on (those short term gains, now, what were they?), but we watched as your species seemed to grow more rabidly self-destructive as his wisdom did not only land on deaf ears, but his punishment for even bringing it up – your kind say there are different reasons for his fate, but then, how can you believe a species whose regard for truth is so miniscule that it can be given away for a little bit of attention even? And we have no such leanings or even understand them, so we've all seen clearly what was done: while Presidents like your most recent one and especially the one who in 1980 began the process of stomping out the truth that had flowered earlier giving us all hope, while those Presidents, the one being honored as somehow great, even as his legacy may be that he destroyed the only chance this planet had of making it through a hundred years, and, ironically enough as your world descends into economic collapse of a kind that might just be the thing, a globe lacking in resources to fight for its very life in the biggest struggle for survival ever seen on this planet – does your kind even know how long a billion years are? Well, in a time that is many times over that this planet has never before seen such a scepter of death hanging over it. And this person who is praised roundly (even by some of your Democrats, again it must be that desperate wanting to be liked you guys have), his big accomplishment, exactly, was what again? Oh, he cut taxes and was supposed to be for smaller government. So, as we approach the end of all beings, all stories ending in one final, perhaps agonizingly stretched out period of years of horror and insanity as those still alive watch the kind of horrific ending that even your best Hollywood folks could not imagine; we watch death all around us and know that it will come sweeping our way at any time, so much in fear – now there's a fear that's real beyond all imagining, not like those imaginary fears that has brought us here, so as this occurs, will we still be lauding this supposed great god The Reagan who convinced the world, rather than to listen to the youth and the previous president and to prepare for this horror, but instead charmed the world, like a snake charmer, into forgetting itself and its survival and instead focusing on money, and not even the prosperity of the majority, no, rather he began again that thousands of years old evil of your kind of the powerful feeding on the less powerful making them weaker, and despairing again, and not only stealing from those below them, but he actually began that horrible slide, the end result we are sinking down with right now, of stealing from the generations to come; for though claiming to be a tight-fisted conservative determined, supposedly, to slash away at a government to big and costing too much money, in fact, quite the opposite, much like his current little protégé, between he and his successor, the elder Bush, they managed nearly a 400% rise in the National Debt, and never balanced a budget. As for big government, while he slashed programs "budget cuts" they were called, he bloated the military, as if that were somehow not considered government. In essence his theories were the old rehashed rationalizations of strong men down through the ages, kings, tyrants, nobles – all those who loudly proclaimed, as if by repeating it enough it could make it true – that they, the rich and privileged were the best managers of wealth and so their robbing and stripping away of the prosperity of all those below them, keeping them on a level of bare subsidence – by the way, we know, for we witnessed it, that that extra seemingly unnecessary stripping away of any form of wealth that might grant a little security was not done for the earlier reasons, that is, we're better managers and will make us all prosperous. No, for it seems that no matter how facile your kind is in lying even to itself, you r kind still has some kind of basic survival mechanism that tells them that they have in fact performed great evil, great evil and suffering that could very well result in an uprising against them by an enraged populace. But then, just as now, in the last eight years under Bush where it became increasingly clear that only the complete stomping into the dirt of the other than wealthy could keep them from rising up in revolt; yes, then too, part of them knew the great wrong and were fearful – so what else is new – your kind doing the greatest of evils and terrorizing and murdering because of the fears that the tyrants harbor. So these class wars – well hardly wars – for with the wealthy always and everywhere not only controlling and directing the Muscle and Might – used to keep the masses down and humbled and suffering and near starving, as a way of keeping them from getting strong enough to rise up in anger; but they control as well all the information systems – that is why, indeed, so many of you will disregard truth so easily, for you do know that saying the truth, down through the ages, got people killed. When I say they controlled the information I mean that they pronounced for all that lived under their thumb what exactly the truth was, what attitudes to have, even, what religion one had to believe in. And so they, like those of the current era, should there be one daring to "not mind his own business" and to find out and to spread some of the realities of their lot and the truths, inconvenient to those in power of course, which would tear a hole in their cruder but just as pervasive and hypnotic unreality, well these people were, sometimes in full view so as to warn others, and other times, like under Pinochet, or the Chinese at the time of the Tiananmen Square, there would be an outside disapproving world to such behavior, so these outspoken people simply disappeared in the dead of night.
So, Wilber, the point I'm making is that you now find yourself, like those thieves of old, making a game out of the suppression, murder, and suffering of the masses, as a way of controlling the fear inside you that you have because for so long you have been estranged and not trusting of the Perfect All That Is that managed to sustain billions upon billions, nay, trillions of beings of all kinds on this planet, and so many countless of them playing their parts in this planets slow development, living and dying, even before your species existed. And in your short existence, how you have managed to muck up the perfection wrought by so many over such a long period. Are we sorry for you? Yes. For with your fears and pain you are the saddest of all beings here. But that sadness, and that fear that covers it, is no excuse for the angry murderous rage that is layered over the fear and partakes of its energy, a rage that is horrific enough directed against your own, but now is taking down all life and obliterating the histories and efforts of untold trillions of souls who've lived and died before use – human and nonhuman. So, Wil-ber, that is why I must speak up, that is why I no longer can stand mutely by as you laugh at your supposed mere prankishness. For, Wilber, it was never "mere" and it was never only prankish to the people whose lives were shunted into a stifling, suffering, and brutishly short existence, who cried horribly as loved ones died, were raped to death at times, and suffered so many things that you have no conception of nor do you want to be aware of the consequences of your actions, your kind never did. That is how you were able to see yourself as just mischievous sorts when to others you appeared very much to be devils from hell – can you handle that? Well, finally it must be said. And I will end this discourse by saying the things that your kind are, currently, striving not to hear and are actually, as you lose your support among the people who finally have suffered too much and many also seeing that this kind of insanity cannot be allowed to happen at such a crucial time for the survival of us all. Yes, again, just like in that time before that President Clinton, we again have a generation, indeed we have a generation and we have many from all generations now living, who will not take the purple pill of unconsciousness as they see the madness of the ages as perpetrated by your kind of others magnified beyond all imagining at a time when our survival requires we get every break we can. So how crazy your kind, how cruel your Republicans, how unbelievably evil your kind, so greedy and uncaring of the suffering and death you cause that at this worst possible moment you are not merely the rich, but so voracious your appetite that the term "filthy rich" has been put on you. And while Republicans were actually proud of that and thinking it humorous that anyone would be offended, for to them it meant that despite their losing their control over the minds of the masses, they had accumulated so much wealth that they would not and could not be hurt. They would be able, as always, to use that wealth to undermine the legitimate strivings of everyone else for justice, for the truth, for relief from suffering, but now even for the survival of us all and, dear Wilber, how can your kind not know that includes themselves as well. Still, these truths must be made known and be thrown up to counter those fewer but somehow even more loudly heard Republicans. The truth is that your kind has suffered greatly because of a fear that caused you to stray from trusting in a good God, as you put it, that caused you to instead strive mightily to control the powers that would have guided and taught you and given you a happier life than you could ever have designed on your own, oh sadly feeble minded ape in suffering pushed to be insane ape, and railing against all that by claiming superiority over all life and Godlike powers of deciding death, now even determining the death of the planet along with yourselves. So sad, so insane, so abhorrently unconsciously evil; and in the end, it is not naked or sexual or big brained ape that will be on your galactic epitaph, as your deeds are already being known and discussed and astonishing many species lucky enough to not be of this planet right at this time, yet they've come to watch the spectacle, to see: will you pull off the most incredible turnaround the galaxies have ever heard of to save yourselves, or will that epitaph go forth to accompany the knowledge of your existence: "Stupid ape" is what it will be. It might still be that even if you do succeed, though I don't see how you'll do it. Each day that passes and in your most powerful country, the stupid "filthy rich" continue their game of, well, quite literally, actually, "pin the tail on the donkey" as they pull their strings and their Republican lapdogs cry out the louder being obstructionists to the good people who are trying to save, why, even your foolish hide. And their media puppets, having been allowed to back off on the sincere and competent Obama as even the "deciders" behind the scene tired of their C-student puppet, the W, who, while loyal in doing their bidding and indeed giving them such great success was even more embarrassing than that Nixon they'd made a similar mistake on earlier. Even the prankish filthy rich, looking out at the masses as oh, just way too many ants, were not pleased by the buffoonish, clownish behavior of the W, who couldn't even pull off the pretense that he was working hard; indeed, with his funny dances and playboy party behavior in the courts of the world and in front of the cameras of the world, he seemed to actually be trying to go down in history as being the realized human manifestation of that "mythical" character known since the Fifties, and introduced to generation after generation of males, in particular, usually in high school and junior high as that "What? Me Worry?" idiot icon Alfred E. Neumann. Thus it seemed that Bush, who they thought would bring at least "good looks" to the job, in the end seemed to be aiding the forces against them by playing into this notion that this idiot icon could have been some kind of freakish premonition of the coming of the W after the turn of the century. And so embarrassed they didn't want to be, and yet, bad luck again, the McCain could not seem to stop being caught in obvious lies, and looking freakishly old and muddled headed, so much like the W; on top of which the Sarah Pailin, they were backing the overgrown preppie Mormon, an obviously sure thing to take us back to the monotonous suppression and feigned happiness of the Fifties. Then the Palin came along, and the legend of buffoonish Republican leaders was hardly quashed but instead reinforced. So Obama they let the media do as they wished with. And we see now what their plans were. Not a bad stroke, to commit the biggest theft in history in front of the eyes of the world and to kneecap the Obama presidency even before it began with this huge bailout, extorted from hapless Congressmen by their lackeys who used the threat, not of an attack that "just might be a nuclear one" as they'd had Bush phrase it to scare the be-jeesus out of everyone and into a war of profit for them, but something very much like that, to our amusement. When we heard about the threats of a "economic nuclear holocaust" from which the world would never recover, and the blatant auto sales tactics to boot, it was astonishing to us that nobody saw through it and, sure enough, in broad daylight, your kind cleaned out the treasury on their way out of town. Brilliant, if it wasn't so stupid. For even in a few months it became increasingly known that the money was not being used to provide lending, but instead was often used to feather the nests of the bank officers, the CEO from Chase actually got caught saying he wasn't about to lend any of the 15 billion in taxpayer money out, for he'd be able to sit on it and be able to pick off the falling banks on the cheap. Then there was the fact that instead of liberalizing their lending policies to the very taxpayers whose money it was, they instead began an evil pernicious policy of draconian credit card policies, apparently designed to force as many defaults as possible – raising interest rates into the mid 20s and 30 percent range and beyond, thus insuring a default, on a loan that if the attempt were made to keep paying would go up into the millions at that interest rate, and thus would not be ever paid. Fine by the banks, who seeing an opportunity to double dip, could gather more toxic assets in preparation for the next operation, called TALF but Ocean's 12 would be more like it, and along with it still have these defaults with enormous interest rates which they could use to squeeze and beat back the poor, just like the royalty of yore who stripped to the bones their peasants and kept them weak and undefended.
be taken away their power But I will talk as long as I need to, having not said anything to you before about this, but knowing that now, if I don't do my part to say to you what I know, then if your kind does indeed do what it appears you're t
1ever since certain people began thinking they were privileged, better, and closer to goodness simply because of, say, being luckier, they have been sucking the very life blood out of the masses and keeping the poor downtrodden, ignorant, beholden to them whether rightfully or not, unhappy, and enslaved. And Wilber, being a mere beast myself and seeing your kind forever expecting more as a matter of right, forever unaware that suffering whether by beast or the unnamed masses is as real, as sharp, often much sharper, than that of the rich. So I'm not lifting my head and braying your praises anymore, no matter what you do. You see, Wilber, your paid for support and theories are not only irrational and self-serving, they are not only harmful, and therefore not funny, and they not only spread waves of pain out from your high-handed actions. Your easy cruelty is not only unkind or unfair, you see, but it is murderous. For just as Hitler once openly acted and believed that a better society would exist if the weak and unproductive and the lesser, by the determination alone, of the prejudices of him and his kind alone, and this resulted in the slaughter, suffering, murder, and elimination of millions -- millions who never got to find out what life could have been for them, well this same attitude murders people now, too. For there will always be those whose fate it is to stumble, to draw the black Ace. And lacking resources as they are made to live just on the edge of survival, some small thing to you might mean the end for one of them; it being just enough to break him so badly, like a whipped horse, you see, that such a person's mangled body will never rise again. So, not funny Wilber, my head is down, and I won't be part of the big lie anymore."
Or so it seemed, as the Dow's mighty charts swung lower, then lower, then lower still. Expressing the weariness of the overworked masses and their despair as they were seeing their dreams of eking out a tad of happy existence, year by year, burdened with debt, seems to be further off, rather than closer. And the despairing millions give up their "ghosts" at that, regardless of how much longer their body manages to suffer through its daily movements, with little or nothing left to hope for. No, Wilber, your kind has infected the world with the lies that give you your brief period of privilege and superiority on this Earth. But not only have you stolen from the poor, but you've killed off God's creatures, mindlessly, in your vapid mind games, and now, even the planet itself. So your kind will even kill off its own in the end. Your evil is in the end, at its base, the thick meaty dumbness that, and this is a bit funny, you see instead in those you despise. The jig has been up for many of the masses especially since the beginning of the 1980s. Many have suffered, fallen, and died, while you played. But now even you will know suffering. And it will be interesting to see just how much of your own entrails you will devour before it even occurs to the meaty thickness of your brain that it is you that you hurt.
***
Well, Ed, thank you for that perspective; certainly it's one we don't often hear. But, I thank you, because that is exactly what I've trying to say here; I'm trying to say that, far from the excuses of the culpable and criminal, there are perspectives that are relevant and are never heard. And I'm talking about perspectives that are right outside the doors of power ready to talk and be heard; often having been perspectives that had been embraced not long ago, but suddenly, not having any credibility at all . . . so that our democracy of many voices, with an administration and a media in collusion to mine only one avenue of discourse, begins to echo the Soviet Union of old with its one voice, Pravda.
But we all know now what these people claim they could not even imagine as possible, well, they have all happened. One wonders what these buffoons who could not foresee such things will do in terms of fixing them; having acknowledged their extreme lack of foresight (and we've added, their extreme inability to look anywhere farther than their tight knit group of true believers for answers.) This should be something to see.
Let's take another look at how the media has dealt with other perspectives, to flesh out my claims above of these perspectives not being far off. On CNBC, they used to have Robert Reich on the show, Clinton's economic guy, but he was talked over, laughed at, and was routinely talked to as if he was a child or suffered sadly from some kind of bleeding heart brain cloud. Well, as his words began to be the ones that should have been listened to, he was no longer to be seen on CNBC. Thus we have such a comment that "nobody" could have seen it coming. No, apparently there was such an insular crowd on Wall Street, the White House, and, most unfortunate, among the very media whose job it was neither to make news as prognosticators or economic experts, nor was it to be part of a partisan "anti-plunge patrol." Their lack of even-handedness and their alliance with particular theories, created just the kind of apparent reality that the trader bemoaned. No, it wasn't that nobody was seeing it coming -- as you see below, I was seeing it as inevitable from the shared experience of a mere decade or so ago. And I mention one figure who was silenced. So to the mystified trader who knew no one who saw anything but, as one particularly wrong-headed man phrased it, "a goldilocks economy." So blinded by their greed, they missed what the people I knew were all seeing -- danger ahead, and the unsustainability of a rally that had risen on so much manipulation, misinformation, and constant drum blows of obviously wrong economic talking points hammered over and over across our airwaves and drowning out every sound of warning or opposition, so that surprise and misinformation informed the trading decisions of the great bull traders.
So many people were hurt by this partisan power play, but that was the way of just about everything during those 8 years of, as one recent writer dubbed it, dictatorship.
If you're still reading, you will see I have reasons for pointing these things out, providing this background, for it is this context of a kind of dumbness rising to the top, which even now, makes for the strangest of comments on TV talk shows, and the most asinine and foot--shooting policies and stances of the remaining Republicans.
All this being said, now, what follows may provide, as it did to me, a provocative window into the workings of cause and effect, as well as the of the huge efforts of deception that are ever needed to advance false partisan ideas that, though proven wrong, will by greed be raised anew and carried forth banner like, to beat back the voices of common sense in favor of a reality that must be forced to be made to be true only because its rich adherents would wish it to be so.
This not-quite-finished article needs to be included and seen to really understand why I would be shocked at what I said back then. One might even say that some of the things I was saying were paranoid. Which makes an interesting point. Here we have a "case study," actual hard evidence that what would have sounded "paranoid" then is now part of American's knowledge of recent history. So, paranoid or prophetic, guess they can be hard to tell apart. Anyway here is the untainted mirror into the visions of a mind and its nine-year ago meanderings. Do parts of it seem really like they are out of today's news? Why would that be when these two Presidents are so different? And then do you see the huge contrast between the way things were seen then and the way we look at our world today? Any and all comments are welcome. Really astute ones are especially appreciated. It follows:..
TIME CAPSULE – Part 2: "CAN AMERICA AFFORD TO GO
"IN THE BUSHES"?
What They Succeeded in Having Us Believe and America's Last Chance to Realize the Ideals of a Generation
"Stay Out the Bushes!"
Yet Little Talk of Scandal Arose
At the Democratic Convention this past week, Jesse Jackson exhorted us "Stay out the Bushes"! His chant was echoed by the convention-goers, creating, arguably, the most dramatic event of the convention (though, since it was blacked out of all networks save C-Span, you probably didn't see it)1 He was referring to voting for George W. Bush for President, of course. But he gave examples of what his brother ("Baby Bush" as Jesse told it) did as Governor of Florida and George W.'s father ("Papa Bush," according to Jesse) did as President. He pointed out the heinous record of the Bush family, point by point, until he had the house rockin with "Stay out the Bushes!" It was clear that Jesse felt America could not afford the disaster of another Bush presidency.
Cut to another time, on the convention floor, when doing the roll call for electing the President, a delegate from my former home state of Colorado made mention of how another Bush son (I think he said Neils Bush) had run from Colorado in shame after squandering two-hundred million dollars (someone might correct me on the exact amount) of Coloradan's money in risky and unethical ventures when he was at the helm of a major Savings and Loan Corporation there. This was back in the days of the Savings and Loan scandal.
Despite the fact that the Republicans, including George Bush Senior, pledged hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out these corrupt banking officers at that time, little talk of scandal arose. This, even though it was said at the time that our grandchildren would still be paying, as taxpayers, on these hundreds of billions of dollars in S&L bailouts. Yet little talk of scandal arose.
This is What They've Succeeded in Having Us Believe
Instead, years later, the media piled onto the flimsiest of evidence concerning Democratic President Bill Clinton and the supposed "Whitewater" scandal. Though, despite years of digging by an unlimitedly funded Special Prosecutor, they came up empty on anything illegal on the Clintons, the media was tireless in raising its voice in slandering our sitting Democratic President and his wife. It is my recollection also that the amount of money involved in the supposed scandal of Whitewater was a tiny fraction of that squandered by the Bush son (not to mention that involved in the entire S&L scandal) – I believe it was two million or less, making it about one-hundredth or less of that involved in Bush's Colorado S&L scandal. Despite these facts, the media had the American people believing that this was a story of so much importance and was such a scandal that it was often compared with Nixon's Watergate scandal. This is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
So, what is my point?
Speaking to mostly Nader voters, and especially to "My Generation," I wish to pose this question: What have the Republicans accomplished in the last few decades? More correctly, what has the Shadow Government accomplished since the coup de etat, involving the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, which installed the Shadow Government, with its figurehead Lyndon Johnson at the highest levels of our government and has kept it there ever since except during the brief Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter and during the Clinton Presidency? Oh, but you say you thought Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK and that he was a lone, crazed gunman, who alone plotted and perpetrated the assassination? Very interesting. Well, this is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
So a little history lesson for starters . . . for those who don't know: You thought the "Conspiracy Theory" of JFK's assassination was something that was put out by Oliver Stone in his movie, "JFK," and has been roundly repudiated. I know, I watched the movie and I watched the reaction on TV. I'll never forget the segment on CBS, with Dan Rather, which was announced as being a looking into the claims put out by Stone in his movie. I sat, amazed, as Rather focused on a few peripheral issues in the movie -- ones that I do not even remember being IN the movie -- and, proving them inaccurate, concluded that the movie "JFK" was pure fiction. Of course this is a common ploy to avoid dealing with an issue. It is diversion and distraction from the real issues, but it has a particular name: "setting up a straw man." In discrediting SOMETHING, Rather was claiming to have discredited EVERYTHING. The whole show rested on his credibility with the American people. People who had not seen the movie came away convinced that the movie's plot and details were spun out of thin air. Those of us who saw the movie were silenced by the weight of CBS and Dan Rather and the influence they carry. (Interestingly, I have been told that Rather himself was in Dallas that day, as a journalist covering the story, when Kennedy was killed. Coincidence?)
But what was that, a decade ago? Times have changed. Only two weeks ago, I saw on the History Channel a series called "The Men Who Killed Kennedy." It spelled out in detail and with videotaped interviews of people close to the conspiracy and photos of the other men involved in the shooting just who killed Kennedy, who was behind it, who ordered it, and how it was carried out. There were in fact four gunman. They were hired by the Mafia outside this country -- it was not clear just who had hired them, but it was people in this country. And it was clear that people in the CIA, the FBI, and the local Dallas police were involved. It was also made clear that people as high up as Earl Warren, former Supreme Court Justice, were involved as they had gone along with it in putting out the Warren Commission Report -- a pack of lies. But don't take my word for it. You can see the documentary on the History channel yourself. I'm sure they will be playing it again and again.
But the upshot is that we had a coup in this country. That is in fact the last thing that was said in the documentary. It was said that this truth should come out so that people can know that it is not only Third-World undeveloped countries that can have coups; that in fact the source of worldwide democracy can itself have one, and indeed has had one in its recent past.
But the media in this country is still covering it up. This should be front-page news. It is not. The myth of the lone gunman and that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy still stands. This is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
Furthermore, since Kennedy was assassinated, we accomplished several major things in this country: a major revised tax structure that took from the poor and gave to the rich in the Eighties -- called the largest transfer of wealth in American history; the escalation and deeper involvement in a Vietnam War -- costing many human lives, but benefitting the defense contractors (Kennedy was shot within a short time of his telling his advisors that he was going to back out of our involvement in Vietnam); the increased concentration of power in huge multinational countries -- many of whose revenues exceed that of half of the nations on the globe; and more recently, the defeat of a universal national health care plan along with a right-wing conspiracy (it has been proven, folks) against Bill and Hillary Clinton that has been going on since he took office in 1993. These are just a few; I haven't even mentioned the obvious ones like Contragate and our illegal involvement in the affairs of Latin American countries. Now, all of this may sound paranoid. But this is what they've succeeded in having you believe
What else have they succeeded in having us believe?
I recently received an e-mail from someone who responded to my Musepapers supporting Clinton regarding the Lewinsky scandal. He started his tirade with this "Clinton's a loser." Clinton a loser? Clinton -- only one of three presidents in the last fifty years of this country to succeed in getting elected a second time and having a full eight-year term. In fact, he is the only Democrat to accomplish that since FDR. And what did Clinton accomplish as Governor of Arkansas? What was it, some kind of record I think, since they have elections for Governors every two years there I believe. Anyway, I think he was elected to the governorship something like ten times. And then there is this guy, calling me "Dude," telling me that Clinton is a loser. I wonder who this guy is, and what he has accomplished in his life that he can call one of the most popular and elected public figures of our time a loser. But, isn't that what we do? We see outside what we hold inside. Something tells me that this "dude" guy knows a lot more about being a "loser," than Clinton will ever know. Still, with the media's help, he thinks he has the right to pile on this besieged President, making claims about him that are absolutely the honest on the plain surface of them. But this is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
At the Democratic National Convention, Clinton was skewered by the media about his, supposedly "cheesy" long walk down through the halls to the auditorium as he was coming to make his speech. I found out only last night, days there had been a feeding frenzy on this issue -- one fat commentator saying it was the most "narcissistic" display he has seen in politics in his life. Then I find out only last night, days after this frenzy had been allowed to go on, that, in fact the major news networks, owned by the wealthy and the large corporations had taken the video of Clinton's walk and deleted something crucial that would make it have meaning to those of us who watched. It turns out that the program called for captions to be put up, during Clinton's long walk, on the bottom of the screen, detailing the accomplishments of this man's administration over seven and a half years. If it were anyone else -- a Republican like Bush Senior or Reagan -- this would have been considered an aspect of simply honoring the hard work the man has done for the country. It would have been considered an honor he deserved, which he does (his accomplishments on turning around the country are unequaled in American history). But the major networks DELETED the captions and deliberately made Clinton look bad. They called the walk, the "rock star" rock. They called it cheesy and narcissistic. Yet it only appeared so because the networks made it so. This is unheard of! You would never see the media interfering in the scripted programs of a Republican Convention. Yet this part of the script was denied the American people. Despite the fact that Clinton enjoys a 60+% approval rating -- higher even than Reagan or Eisenhower did at this time in their presidencies (and, by the way, these are the only two presidents who, as mentioned above, served a full eight years in office) -- the networks decided to make Clinton look bad by changing the script. How is this any different than, say, turning off the mike on him or one of the any other speakers when the media doesn't like what is being said. So this is an example of the media creating the news, not simply "reporting" it. Clinton's walk was supposed to be a summary of his accomplishments in office, which 60+% of the American people would have liked to see. It was not supposed to be a "cheesy" or "narcissistic" walk. Still it was reported in this way by the pundits and commentators and the journalists and anchorpersons on all the major networks (including and especially the ones that deleted the captions to make the walk appear that way). So this is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
The night of the convention on which Joe Lieberman talked I heard him refer to previous presidents at one point and the last two of the four were "Reagan, and Clinton." This is what I heard; live on TV, with my own ears. Afterwards I came across a floor commentator state, in trying to keep alive the slander/scapegoating of Clinton, that it is noteworthy that Lieberman mentioned Reagan and significantly and deliberately left out Clinton. Yet no correction of these things ever occurs. One wonders if they are so caught up in their Pain and their hate or their desire to create a story, add to the drama, or whatever, that the TV journalist in question actually simply blocked out, in his mind, the next two words after the word "Reagan" and never heard them. This is in keeping with psychological understandings of what folks do to their very experience and reality. But the news media and our networks have lots of money to try to get the facts right. And they would have us believe that we have an unbiased news media, despite the evidence of our own ears. This is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
I received an e-mail from someone who called me naïve in supporting the Iraqi bombing. Hussein propped up and made by the CIA. But this is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
What else they have accomplished in this country. The mean-spiritedness. The cynicism.
Surely the tactic of scapegoating is a major human defense. Slander. I've seen it used recently on myself and my wife by an organization with which we were not too long ago heavily involved. Despite the fact that the media's prime way of commenting on events is to undo any good in any event that it is reporting on, they blame the lack of interest in the election and the lack of on the politicians. This is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
Throughout the eight years of this administration constant mention of the rumors and the leaks but woeful and begrudging of the coverage of the great and grand things this administration has achieved. From the Right, Clinton can't get away with anything; from the Left, Clinton can't get credit for anything. But this is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
I believe we are in grave danger of losing, not just an election, not just a Supreme Court, not just our environment, not just our good economy, not just our recent relative peace in the world but things far worse than those horrors. I believe we are in danger of losing all hope of maintaining, let alone progressing, in the freedoms and privileges that we take for granted. Take HMO I have a sister But she has been and probably still will be voting Republican. She's certain that it is the Democrats who are at fault. This is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
My spiritual teacher says we live in the Kali Yuga. It is the most unrighteous of times. A time in which black is portrayed as white and vice-versa. It is only an understanding this extreme that can assuage the frustration my wife and I feel when we tune in on the social hypocrisy and lying that we see on a daily basis on our TV screens.
Yet the talk shows are flooded with talk of hatred of Clinton and Democrats and talk of how In fact, just yesterday, Hillary Clinton, after spending uncountable amounts of money to bring down her and her husband was absolved of any wrongdoing in the Whitewater suppose "scandal." This supposed "scandal" has hung over the White House for almost the entire Clinton presidency. Yet despite an unlimited amount of time and money they are able to come up with exactly zero on the Clintons. Yet, they say there is no right-wing conspiracy in this country. Well, this is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
So is this election important? I believe it is. For me it is especially important, for I feel that if the Republicans take over, they will do so much to damage to the dreams of my generation that even if the Democrats were to be reelected to all branches of government in 4 or 8 years, they will do so much damage (the example of Reagan-Bush nearly QUADRUPLING the National Debt in their mere 12 years being the perfect example) that My Generation will have to clean up their mess afterwards, taking more years. And only then will we be in a position to progress in this country and world and bring it more in line with the ideals of peace, love, community, and harmony we envisioned in the Sixties.
So what I mean is that if we fail in the next 80 days, I can envision no more time of real hope again, for this country or the world, until I am in my Sixties, Seventies, or older. And then, even then, there will be no real hope. For as it is said of the poor, these forces of regression, Cowboy shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot, cynicism, and – let us call it what it really is: evil – will always be with us.
I think if Gore loses, my wife and I might just move to Canada. Though with the increased nuclear threat, the global pollution, which the Republicans will surely bring, there will be no place to run or hide, really.
Gore wrote a book titled Earth In the Balance. Despite the fact Gore was ridiculed by Republicans in the Congress of our great land passages read out loud for the sake of derision. This is what they've succeeded in having us believe.
Concerning what this has to do with pre- and perinatal psychology, I want to point out that the cynical attitude is one wrought of early infant lack of bonding at birth. One is not nursed at birth, and is instead taken away to be "worked on" by total strangers. This leaves a lifelong imprint of hatred toward the world.
And this is part of the birth matrix of feelings described by Stanislav Grof. BPM II hopelessness, hate, and derision. Specifically, it is part of the attitude that "the whole world is wrong." Everything is evil. Everyone is evil and has a hidden agenda. It is evidence, as I point out in my book, xxxxx, that we are closer, these days to our unconscious birth pain.
Concerning what this has to do with psychohistory, well Lloyd deMause and psychohistorians after him, have pointed out that it is in the best of times that we have a tendency to get into wars and to create sacrificial victims to assuage our feelings of being "fat" and prosperous. This has its roots in the fact that the neonate, at birth, after accomplishing the huge achievement of being born, is, instead of being welcomed into the world, slapped around, shunted from place to place, measured and weighed and scrubbed clean, and taken away from the only world it has know -- it's mother -- to be placed into a sterile cradle or, worse, incubator. So we become frightened when we have accomplished something because our experience is that something worse will follow. To stave off that feeling, we make it happen. To stave off prosperity, we get into wars, or we squander our wealth (like current candidate Bush wants to do with our Budget Surplus). That way we can derail the rising feelings of "something worse is going to happen," which happens after or when we're about to accomplish prosperity and peace. We just have to screw it up.
Concerning also what this has to do with psychohistory, I want to point out that I read on the psychohistory listservice at one point last year . . . a Malthusian theory that has since been disproven (This is what they've succeeded in having us believe).
As for what this has to do with primal theory, it is part of the often observed tendency to shoot ourselves in the foot, when the going gets good, for having it good is not something we are used to; Pain is what we are familiar with; misery is what we know -- it constitutes the comfortable furniture of our meager existences.
Concerning what this has to do with Primal, I want to point out that the tendency to sabotage ourselves, to screw up any good thing, because bad things are what were familiar to ourselves, is the hallmark of neurosis and is what Primal helps us to overcome. Ally McBeal once had to see her psychotherapist because, as she put it, she was feeling happy. And John Cage offered to let her have his appointment spot because, as he put it, I've got some minor rejection anxiety and so on, but nothing as critical as feeling happy.
Concerning what this has to do with Breathwork, let me point out what Grof has said about the way we have manifested globally what is our perinatal, particularly BPM II and III experiences, in terms of "polluting our own nest," etc. etc. See the article on this site.
Concerning what it has to do with the New Age, if all the theories above come to pass this time, there will not be any "new age." In fact, we will continue down the path of struggling until the end of our days. -- both the hippie and New Age visions of global peace, harmony, and love having turned out to be nothing but fantasies. Those of us involved in the New Age movement will end up feeling we have wasted our lives in a useless struggle. We will die, disillusioned and disappointed, like Abbie Hoffman was when he popped back the pills that took his life.
But again, there is hope in the fact that our closeness to our unconscious birth pain makes it possible for our society, for the first time in history, to not spoil, squander, or waste our accomplishments or prosperity, but to actually build on it, going into a new phase unlike anything known in history before -- a true New Age. My book, xxxxx, explains how this time has the chance of being different. And the current polls, which show Gore leading, indicate that we may just be on the road to that New Age after all.
I urge everyone to not just vote. I am taking time away from rebuilding my house, from doing my taxes for the last two years, from working on the lawsuit against the insurance company that has kept my wife and myself living out of an RV for over 14 months, and from an enormous number of tasks that have built up due to the fire and the other tragedies referred to above, in order to write this MusePaper. We plan to contact our local Democratic headquarters to see what we can do. We also plan to do much on this website to help to inform about this election and encourage people to do something concrete, not just to talk about it. For everyone who reads this and agrees with me on what I've written here, there are probably a thousand that do not – so much have they succeeded in getting so many to believe otherwise. Out of every hundred that agree, there are ninety-nine that will be too unable, physically, psychologically, or financially, or because of truly overriding time constraints, to take any action to prevent the tragedy of the Cowboy Ticket from getting elected. But I hope they will at least vote. So if you are one of the ones left, consider how important it is for you to actually put some action alongside your beliefs. The other side is rich in the power of the push of their Pain, which causes them to fear, hate, distort, and rail against and destroy the good that is coming into being. They are themselves, though they may be anti-abortion, not pro-life but anti-life as they say and do the things that will kill the fetus of the New Age, which is currently growing in America's womb. The numbers of the fearful and in Pain are enormous and their resources are mighty. It is only our sweat, our belief in ourselves, our faith in the grace of a beneficent Higher Power or Universe, the strength of our combined numbers, the xxxx
that can keep this chapter in the novel of our lives from turning it in the direction of being, like the movies, one that ends up labeled a tragedy or that fits into the genres of the happily-ever-afters. You owe it to yourself to help yourself by getting involved. Of course, the world, the Universe, God/Goddess/Higher Power demand it of you too.
Copyright © 2000 by Michael Derzak Adzema
There you have it, the "UN-RETOUCHED PRE-BUSH PERCEPTION
From September 21st, 2000":
What's Your Reaction? My Take on It? Well....
My reaction, at first, was that of being stunned, then saddened at what it reminded me of -- the way things once were, what we had before it was stolen, destroyed... -- but having had time to process and review the changes we've gone through and are going through, placed in relief against the assumptions of that former mind, something new has arrived.
I find that these time-capsule writings from my former mind are able to inform me and sharpen my vision of the Now, as the events continue unfolding and rolling relentlessly over and through us and reflected in high-pixel, high-def, infinite colors clarity on the flat screens all about. This time is felt and witnessed, the story being revealed cinema-like, but with pundits galore expounding 24/7, like loud-mouthed fellow movie-goers, but then also becoming the movie and interwoven into the times themselves. And their words, with this time capsule before me, sounding childish, repetitive, forgetful, amnesiacal. Especially as many of the ones speaking now are remembered as being the exact persons commenting then, and their words, little changed, bespeak a zen-like ability to be newly alarmed, being reborn in every minute, but yet totally unchanged and untaught by all the years of witnessing and commentary. So they also have forgotten the way they once saw the world and their life, just like me. It seems a defense mechanism to forget that we saw all this coming, for to know that is to despair in realizing the impotence, even, of awareness. Who wants to realize that in these matters even a knowledge of the story line, as if having seen the movie once before, is totally useless, and that there is a helplessness in affecting the events of our lives and times, that there is a total futility in changing or steering away or around even the tragedies clearly seen beforehand? For knowing this we feel as detached as actual cinema-goers from the unfolding of the plotline; we feel ourselves to be not actors and hardly even the scriptwriters of our lives, instead merely the witnesses of intensely shocking and stunning events, which we actually expected but hoped we would be wrong. So wouldn't we want to block that awareness of the futility of our actions? Wouldn't we have to in order to have the heart to keep going at it? To get up and keep trying every day? If we remembered, like Charlie Brown approaching the football, or like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill… if we remembered, would we continue to act? No, we have to believe that we will be surprised this time, that indeed Lucy will hold the football and we will complete the kick. It is said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. As true as that is, how ironic then that we realize that those who remember history too clearly are doomed to helplessness in the midst of its unfolding. So it seems we are ineffectual either way. Yet this is not the whole truth. If it were, then the cynicism we felt about "The Audacity of Hope" would have proven a correct perception. We would have been bored, again, watching a naïve young idealistic Black man, like the many before, differing only in skin color, see his efforts, visions, hopes, and heartfelt desires to be helpful and to love away some of the darkness in the world around vanish like the memory of yesterday's storm-driven winds. But we, I, was one time wrong in that cynicism. To the astonishment, truly, of an entire world, Charlie Brown connected with the football, Lucy apologized for her past actions, one heavy boulder remained steady on the top of a hill and gave a man a much needed rest from his endless labors.
....................
For one incredible and glorious time, the movie we'd seen had a different ending – amazing enough – but the tragedy in the original did not occur, and, as if God had for a time touched this planet, this Reality we call our World, our Life… had just for one time touched, tipped, and turned our events so that the awesomely unexpected happened. So that a man so unbelievably naïve and unaware as to declare the "audacity of hope" and to call out and stir up the masses, deluding them as we've seen so many times before, that "yes, we can," would, and we'd have to pinch ourselves to believe it to actually be happening even as we witnessed it, actually succeed in doing exactly what he said he would do, would not only show us that a man could actually affect the course of events, that a person could not only change things from the way they'd always been (what kind of man can this be?), but that he would do it in a grand and sweeping way. That a man who said "yes we can" not only could, but could do it in a way that achieved beyond merely succeeding; never mind that merely succeeding would be doing the impossible. So I am saddened having been awakened from my forgetfulness by this catscan of a mind perfectly preserved in an electronically sealed time capsule… oh, what could have been… but then I remember, happily, that we are, I am, imperfect prophets and seers, that just when it seems we know, for sure now, how things are, the way the world is, and how the movie will end, that just then when we know, totally convinced we are, that truly things will be as they will be and that it is futile to rail against the inevitable, to hope, even to try, that just then when we have finally accepted "reality for what it is," accepted "life on its own terms" not ours, that we'd given up the things of youth, accepted the limitations of life, addressed ourselves, resignedly, to carrying forward on the mundane things of life, to the ordinary activities of everyperson, to the simple responsibilities and expectations of every man, every person, from every time that's every been and accepted the unrelenting lack of specialness in either our times or ourselves… that just at that time we would be touched and wakened to see that the most unchanging thing of life is not its utter resistance to change, its utter forgetfulness and repetition, but is the mysterious darkness surrounding the utter clarity of everyday knowingness, is in fact the imperfection of ourselves even as we observe so clearly the assured imperfection of the world. Knowing that, we know that it is exactly that imperfection, that lack, that evil, that unmoving wrongness of the world that we have tried so futilely to change that, being in us, is the source of the blessedness of life, which is the fact that our ultimate unknowingness is the only true source of a hope that IS real, that being wrong, being imperfect means something unbelievable when you think of it: which is that against all odds, "something wonderful is going to happen," that in spite of ourselves the miraculous can happen, that magic is real, and that hope, and happiness, and blessedness, and forgiveness, and glorious divine wonders beyond even the envisioning of our ideals are possible. And all because the only thing that we can be truly sure of (even when we are finally convinced that we should not expect anything special) is that we can never be sure… which means that anything is possible… which means that everything is possible.
Copyright © 2009 by Michael Derzak Adzema
Afterword
Now that the "time capsule" has told its tale, and I have related what this perception did to me, how it changed me. I'm curious as to how many others had any thoughts at all similar to mine during that period leading up to the election in 2000. Perhaps more among the people reading this than in a random sampling, I would guess. Still, bemusedly I recall that at the time, as I made posts on international List Services, principally on topics of deep feeling psychotherapy, psychohistory, and childhood and Parenting, that I was especially targeted for attack by non-Americans, several French and a German or two, who wanted to know how in hell a mere American presidential election was a thing of consequence to them, or any non-American. I was brow-beaten also for daring to insert politics into matters pertaining to how we teach and love our children, or how we can help to love away each other's traumas. Most often I was told that it didn't matter who won -- Bush or Gore, Democrat or Republican -- that they were all the same.
More telling even than the attacks and the efforts to muzzle me about such "inconsequential" things, was the vast stillness and silence of all the rest who sat silently watching or ignoring the drama, unmoved by the muzzling of opinion (perhaps feeling themselves "cleaner" for not knowing, caring about, or in any way allowing their superior intellects to be dirtied by even the slightest rub up against the mud of profane politics), and so also unmovedly complicit in the ostracism that was the end result. Shocked, I found that only one person out of all three-four groups spoke up for me, supported my position. But even then, disappointingly, she spoke not on the grounds of the need to avert a disastrous outcome in the election -- no, she aped the prevailing and supposedly "superior" position of neutrality about that, and upholding with the rest that strangest of notions to me about intellect and knowledge, the most prevalent notion on it that I observe and hear espoused repeatedly all about, which is (surely there are others thinking this to be strange too, and is it a peculiarly American thing somehow?)... which is this notion that intellect, first-hand knowledge, and intense study and thorough research in any and all fields of knowing lead always to a neutral, dispassionate position in the end, and an acceptance of all the officially accepted, however dissonant and even essentially opposed but at least traditional positions. That stance is a total painful mind-bender to me, as I my view is that intense and passionate search for truth and the actualities of events brings one, it seems to me, and I know of no original contributor in any field, especially of the genius caliber, who has not, by necessity in fact, else it's not a real contribution, come out in the end as passionate advocates, committed and fervent articulators of specific and thoroughly detailed, often comprehensive, even visionary position, which they having suffered, sweated, and patiently waited, sacrificed before they arrived at it, are even seen as identified with it and as hardly neutral about it. So that dispassionate position secretly says to me that like C-student Bush, this person is not so much intelligent as seeks to have the position of intelligent, rather, of intellectual, and the motive is not knowledge, but the benefits of travelling and being accepted in such society and circles. Therefore, it seems, the hardest place to find intelligent discourse is among the groups who are avowedly intellectual by definition. And this stance of neutrality (sometimes, only supposed, actually, as happens often in the field of journalism) strikes me as a real howler, for it would have us believe that the most intelligent of the bunch were the last ones to adopt the heliocentric universe and the globelike nature of our home; wouldn't they also be the last to position themselves on the side of evolution, too. Just imagine any of the great and thoroughly established positions of our days, which once were astonishing discoveries, and I doubt I'd of found these neutral dispassionate types as first to the lecture halls to learn; more likely they woulda been the stoldid types, the Salisveries, hardly the Mozarts, happy to have a position and eager to pick up a paycheck and then to enjoy the ease of hearth and home, comforting and filling food and drink. Happy to be aware of the raskolnikovs, Demians, and Steppenwolf's in literature but totally nonunderstanding of such a nature and hardly believing that such people even exist, let alone walk amongst them. and but on grounds only of fairness, individual expression, you know the old B of R support, though who knows if she may not have been afraid to express her political concerns after witnessing the way her esteemed and "supposedly" high-minded idealistic, and oh-so-eminently mannered, always appropriate, ever so intellectual and high-spoken colleagues had, in what seemed an immediate and collective and nearly audible harrumph-like reflexive turning away and textual mouth-covering, nose-holding reaction, immediately upon my raising the question of politics, worse, of espousing one position, party, and person over another, apparently perceived such a thing exactly the same as if I had loosed something dirty, stinky, sensual or sexual, and at least lowly, for certain, profane, into the space which of a sudden it seemed all had judged to be reserved for only sacred topics (whatever that could mean). appand ose covering or holding its only one of which, among the various groups I wonder now how many of those that criticized me still maintain that in Europe they are only slightly, if at all, affected by American politics; I wonder if those who considered their sympathetic and helping actions in person and one-on-one were the only actions that were useful in the problem of worldwide human misery.
I wonder if there are still those who after the last election are still maintaining that it wouldn't have mattered a twit, in terms of the future of our world and the degree of suffering and dying and torture that it will witness (assuming even that It survives) in the coming 4 to 8 years, if McCain had won. And I wonder how many Katrinas, environmental collapses, massive and increasing species extinctions, stolen elections, rigged voting machines, losses of Democracy, human rights, habeas corpus; governmental mass murders orchestrated to instill fear and hatred enough to wage endless costly wars with the concomitant extinction and suffering of hundreds of thousands of collateral innocents; Big Brotherish listening in and recording of all electronic activity; worldwide slaughter and rape of innocents when not perpetrated then simply ignored or allowed; and worldwide economic collapses, to name just a fraction of the unexpected, unprecedented "dictatorial" actions that resulted from the fact that a Bush not a Gore, a Republican not a Democrat, was placed into the most powerful position on the planet in 2000 by a Supreme Court picked mostly by Republicans and against the will of the majority of Americans (both popularly, and electorally)...just how many such events have to happen to bring about that relatively minor percentage point swing in opinion away from the Republican perpetrators of those atrocities that would allow, at long last, the election of a person from that thoroughly besmirched, maligned, lied about, ridiculed, and laughed about other party of namby-pamby "bleeding hearts" expressing concern for the suffering, espousing useless, profitless, "Kumbaya" moments of fellow feeling, community solidarity, and global caring, having passionate aspirations and allegiances to invisible principles and values which involve the betterment of others -- even nonAmericans! -- beyond just oneself and one's kin, and which as empty-headed , soft, and nonsensical it sounds, they actually place higher than motives of profit; the dimwitted snots actually deeming a good number of things to be greater than money!
to occur in America and the world in order for a Democrat
infrequent election of someone from that alternative party, who, after decades of entrenchment and ever increasing bloating of power and riches arrived at primarily through the consistent scapegoating and then feeding upon and stealing from the vulnerable, the helpless, the poor, and the different, the Republicans have managed greater control, even ownership of so many of the necessary societal institutions -- education, for example, and most of all the mainstream medias that these talking heads of the popular media have, as though programmed in their utterances so that the narrowest vision comprised of the snide comments insulting and misinforming appellate carefully crafted over time by Republican operatives and fed to their lackeys to for the purpose of beating down through repetition and total lack of any accompanying informing or contradictory viewpoint (see the rise and fall the "liberal" appellate, somehow brought to its grave by someone's strange verbal construction , however lacking in meaning but having the quality, the crucial thing sought, so as to malign and affect opinion and feeling, of it sounding offensive and wrong and something that nobody, I mean nobody, would find appealing and identifiable to themselves (see the success of the nonsensical but hugely unappealing monocle of "bleeding heart" which, added to and repeated endlessly along with the word, Liberal, has succeeded in the complete and utter destruction of the use of that word, its connotation s being so so distasteful as to sully even that words surrounds as in the unappealing and rarely ever talked about anymore "liberal arts" education, school or ideal. )Mainstream media have managed to convince, through methods of endless repetition of the derisive appellate concocted for them by Republicans and the repetition of nonsensical straw main, Republican biased the point talking points
at long last,
to occur in America and the world in order for a Democrat
A full eight-year course of Republican fare later, served up for, and often forcefed down the craws of both Americans as well as non Americans, I wonder now how many of those that criticized me still maintain that in Europe they are only slightly, if at all, affected by American politics; I wonder if those who put up their noses at politics, and proclaimed proudly their neutrality of their lack of involvement in it, thus expressing their superiority in either their not being brainwashed like us others into thinking it mattered, or in their purity and elitism above us worldly creatures in being above such roughish activities. I wonder if they still think that. And when some of them also espoused that the personal one-on-one sympathetic and helping activities they engaged in were the only ways that one could expect to ever make changes in the world and to alter the global trajectory heading inexorably toward the environmental abyss (among many others), I wonder if by now they'd bothered to do a little math around that concept, with people and their needs and their sufferings ever rising at the same time as we rapidly increase global warming.
Lastly, having heard it so proudly proclaimed before all elections and by personages both public and private and with equal sort of superiority, I wonder if there are still those who after the last election are maintaining that it wouldn't have mattered a twit, in terms of the future of our world and the degree of suffering and dying and torture that it will witness (assuming even that It survives) in the coming 4 to 8 years, if McCain had won in America. But even then, I ask, just how many Katrinas, environmental collapses, massive and increasing species extinctions, stolen elections, rigged voting machines, losses of Democracy, human rights, and habeas corpus; governmental mass murders orchestrated to instill fear and hatred enough to wage endless costly wars with the concomitant extinction and suffering of hundreds of thousands of collateral innocents... just how much infinite debt, burdening Americans and their children for generations without end, created not out of any spending for healing or the alleviation of suffering of any kind but solely out of the desire of that wealthiest, unnamed 1% of Americans, since the Sixties, but especially rapidly since the Eighties with Reagan-Bush I and now with Bush II, and controlling 60% of all resources, still wanting more, refusing to contribute even the slightest, and in the end result, not merely aligning their riches to bring illegally into power another Bush to redistribute upward the wealth alongside the stomping ever increasingly into the dirt the poor and working classes. A Budget surplus after eight years of Democratic leadership in the 90s, a hard fought for budget surplus, cavalierly gifted to the least needy and the most greedy, as practically Bushes first big act after receiving the Presidency (almost like it was a payback); and right to the end, to the final days of Bush's second term -- everyone aware of Obama's plans for major changes in health care, the environment, jobs, and so much else to benefit the greatest numbers and the most needy -- well, too conveniently to not be suspicious and yet with all the boldness of an outlaw gang of the old West terrorizing the citizens of an isolated town, who unashamedly and in their last looting before moving on, resort to stripping the town bare, removing even the gold in the townsfolk's teeth, and laughing uproariously, powerdrunk, upon overhearing the sobs of mothers contemplating the feeding of their children, the agonized groans of fathers feeling defeated and helpless to protect, nor even to sustain their families. We observe the strong arm tactics of the representatives of these greedy elites calling the shots of politicians from their hidden or disguised positions. We hear the Democrats of Congress bullied with another fearful specter, some kind of financial nuclear holocaust at the eleventh hour. With all the temerity to actually employ, undisguisedly, the high pressure, railroading tactics of auto salesmanship, we see an extortion by the rich of such magnitude as if to insure the failure of America's leadership in bringing forth the society of ordinary opportunity for all, and a health care affordable enough to allow citizens a little respite from the knowledge of their inevitable death. No, instead we see what seems an attempt to rob the store one last time (and hearing the voices of CEOs like that at Chase who afterwards bragged that they would not loan out even a penny of the $30 billion they received and instead use it buy up their competition, thus insuring even greater profits), it's difficult to believe it was anything BUT what it so obviously appeared to be. So handicapping the sincere efforts of good politicians and leaders who would want to make a better situation for us all, doing it so far into the future as to insure a kind of soft burden or soft cage of enslavement for Americans forever into the future. So great the theft, so great the extortion over the course of eight years that at least one expert has written a book, whose calculations he struggles with in every scenario have a results that all carry one conclusion in common: that America will never, repeat, never again be able to regain the relative material gains and ordinary prosperity for those who worked for it, that for a long time it held out to its citizens.
Yet immediately after the election of a Democratic president we hear the persistent cacophony of Republican and wealthy misconstruction and misinformation. Crying out all the louder in blaming Obama for the very things they had accomplished during their eight years at the cash register, as if by doing so they could blot out the memory of the much greater outpourings of tax dollars and for ends much less noble, in fact, we're already find out the ends ignoble, as the banks take the help and then conduct a campaign to bankrupt and default everyone they can find who is dangling on the edge, not well off like them, nor yet overboard. It seems a calculated attack on Americans by the faceless wealthy elite who for reasons we can't understand appear to want to actually destroy or weed out of existence all but the very strong (who, often, we see, are the very types who have aligned themselves with the multinationals). It is hard to understand, this assault on ordinary Americans by this unknown faceless enemy and for unknown reasons. But sure enough, with talk of a great depression and having received unprecedented handouts to help those struggling with debt, we find that currently a nationwide campaign has been ratcheted to full speed, and it involves the unilateral, universal, and comprehensive doubling, tripling, and more of credit card interest rates, whose effects, while many are simultaneously facing job layoffs, can only bring about more often than not, the loss also of home loans, meaning loss of credit, job, and home all at once. One can only wonder at the designs behind such cruelty.
As for me, my greatest wonder is how it is that some of the American people are still going along with the Republican lies as they cover, still, for the continued looting of the poor by the rich. Eight years long; but still continuing; and, again, I'm wondering at how some people, following upon many in the media who are engaged in the coverup, the bait and switch, the offering up of newly elected Obama for the sins of a secret wealthy class over the course of almost thirty years plundering the poor with Republicans help and now without even connivance, shame, or aforethought. In plain sight. And with even more obvious support from the media, as they target job-stimulating "earmarks" many of which are scaled in terms of dollars measured by thousands, while individual bankers so recently bragged about $30 billion being extorted. It is incomprehensible to me that after all we've been through and with all that we see we must deal with, not only know, but also as far into the future as we can imagine, that a good many Americans are still singing with their "daddies" the Republicans. I mean at one time at least one was rewarded with bread and circuses for such misplaced loyalty. Even as they suffer, even as they lose their jobs and self-respect in being unable to care for their families, or even themselves, still they are mesmerized, seemingly unconsciously acting against their own interests. One wonders again at how long one will fee on one's own entrails before at least noticing.
In the next post, I will address that curious behavior, which is uniquely human, to punish oneself and to attack innocents, while the perpetrators of suffering stand untouched and in sight. Indeed, listen up and you hear that it is their voices that are in fact pronouncing the horrid acts to be done, spelling out in detail the sufferings to be endured and to be inflicted.
END
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
The Leaders Were Liars, The Planet is Dying, The Economy Has Imploded... Now, Even a Horse is Pissed at Bush!!
In this piece I begin alluding to a phenomenon we've gotten used to over the last eight years and forgotten it to be strange: Those in power screwing up royally and essentially blaming their dumbness, but then there's more to it. We also witness here a hapless trader losing his shirt on Wall Street, but then Mr. Ed shows up! Yea, I didn't even know he was still alive, did you? Well, he's making up for being out of the limelight, it seems, for while humans apparently can't see what 's coming, Mr. Ed shows off quite an animal's instinctive knowledge. He sees clearly, far into the past and into the immediate future. And he's fed up and won't be shut up, taking the now "filthy rich" Wilber to task. Apparently animals know a lot more about humans than we do about ourselves. While our comeuppance is not pretty (that horse has quite the mouth on him -- you'd never have gotten that from the show! And a rather gruesome imagination), it is not all humans he condemns. Given a chance, I betcha he'd bring back unions.
I feel it is illuminating to relate an event I remember hearing on the financial news in America, on CNBC one day, sometime last fall. One of the expert trader/commentators was being interviewed on the floor of the actual exchange and surrounded by all the evidence of the carnage. He was asked to give his take on the scary and unprecedented retreat from stocks and those days of multi-hundred point losses, one after the other. This elderly obviously seasoned personality seemed to balloon out several sizes of his suit, in his sheer incomprehension and his near perfect confusion. Still, raising his voicing, a little more squeaky and almost embarrassed, Puffer-Fish guy held forth, as if written on tablets first, how "all the traders have lost money," and then "Nobody's doing OK... " But his afterthought hit me like a spear: He pleaded, "I mean who last year at this time foresaw anything like this coming…I mean," he said "anything at all, at all, like this coming up?"
I laughed out loud feeling the sharp pain in my belly. Is it funny, or horrible, that I had been making money hand over fist as I kept shorting the market, buying only puts. For this seasoned elderly guy, had not had a clue that this downturn could happen, nor apparently, had anyone, any trader, or any CNBC talking head, seen a thing. Still, lowly me, is it because I'm a Democrat? Lowly me, well I did I remember the way Reagan's "Robin-Hood-in-reverse" economics created a great recession, which brought Bill Clinton to power, incidentally, but also how everyone was alarmed at the size of the National Debt, which, during Reagan-Bush I, had more than tripled. It wasn't just me, for I found mentors in the market, who I picked because they also knew we were headed for collapse, and even got laughed at and ridiculed publicaly, on TV, for espousing his views. Still, I found these few not afraid to look squarely at the fundamentals and who were not Republican cheerleaders propping up a Bush economny of give-aways to those not needing it. The market crashed, and we saw the many others, who had been in bed with that Administration and represented the special interests, suddenly realize that Bush could not keep the party going endlessly - anymore than Reagan could. So, suddenly shocked that there were limitations, on things, they could be seen running for the exits like a bunch of cockroaches when the light is turned on.
I also watched as these Republican-speaking mouthpieces for the rich and for the economics of greed were more and more the only voices being heard when the Mr. Ed horse-like chart markings of the DOW began that nodding, as if to say, "I'm weary of being artificially propped up, Wil-ber! I just want to lie down, to let my head hang low, to rest, to not have to confirm self-serving theories of rich people, using their wealth to make the biased and twisted thinking of their underlings to be sounded endlessly above the din of the moaning masses as year after year they see their costs going up, wages stagnating, and their efforts, doubled, tripled, and beyond without being able to get their heads above it. You see, Wilber, I'm tired of doing your bidding for, more than just it being wrong and this thievery perpetrated on the helpless being more feudal than economic, despite the big smokescreen of the god of capitalism or the supposed "free market." No, Wil-ber. And no matter how funny it might seem to you and your friends . . . this pulling off of a prank, once again, of stealing from the poor, it is in fact the same story of the rich making up rules to suit themselves that has been going on ever since humans stopped wandering and began living in stable groupings that allowed some men to gather more things about them than others (as nomads, no one wanted to "own" very much for it had to be carried. But ever since certain people began thinking they were privileged, better, and closer to goodness simply because of, say, being luckier, they have been sucking the very life blood out of the masses and keeping the poor downtrodden, ignorant, beholden to them whether rightfully or not, unhappy, and enslaved. And Wilber, being a mere beast myself and seeing your kind forever expecting more as a matter of right is wrong enough, but I too keenly see also how forever unaware you are that suffering whether by beast or the unnamed masses is as real, as sharp, often much sharper, than that of the rich. So I'm not lifting my head and braying your praises anymore, no matter what you do. You see, Wilber, your paid for support and theories are not only irrational and self-serving, they are not only harmful, and therefore not funny, and they not only spread waves of pain out from your high-handed actions. Your easy cruelty is not only unkind or unfair, you see, but it is murderous. For just as Hitler once openly acted and believed that a better society would exist if the weak and unproductive and the lesser, by the determination alone, of the prejudices of him and his kind alone, and this resulted in the slaughter, suffering, murder, and elimination of millions -- millions who never got to find out what life could have been for them, well this same attitude murders people now, too. For there will always be those whose fate it is to stumble, to draw the black Ace. And lacking resources as they are made to live just on the edge of survival, some small thing to you might mean the end for one of them; it being just enough to break him so badly, like a whipped horse, you see, that such a person's mangled body will never rise again. So, not funny, Wilber, my head is down, and I won't be part of the big lie anymore."
Or so it seemed, as the Dow's mighty charts swung lower, then lower, then lower still. Expressing the weariness of the overworked masses and their despair as they were seeing their dreams of eking out a tad of happy existence, year by year, burdened with debt, seem to be further off, rather than closer. And the despairing millions give up their "ghosts" at that, regardless of how much longer their body manages to suffer through its daily movements, with little or nothing left to hope for. No, Wilber, your kind has infected the world with the lies that give you your brief period of privilege and superiority on this Earth. But not only have you stolen from the poor, but you've killed off God's creatures, mindlessly, in your vapid mind games, and now, even the planet itself.
So your kind will even kill off its own in the end. Your evil is in the end, at its base, the thick meaty dumbness that, and this is a bit funny, you see instead in those you despise. The jig has been up for many of the masses especially since the beginning of the 1980s. Many have suffered, fallen, and died, while you played. But now even you will know suffering. And it will be interesting to see just how much of your own entrails you will devour before it even occurs to the meaty thickness of your brain that it is you that you hurt.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Scout Niblett, Will Oldham, and Barack Obama: Once Again, Authenticity is Everything in Politics, Music Too. If a New Cultural Awakening Is Coming, It's None Too Soon For Me!
I SAW A NEW DAWN RISING, PULLED BACK INTO NIGHT.
I AGAIN SEE A BRIGHTER DAY COMING. OBAMA'S WIN; THE MUSIC OF WILL OLDHAM AND SCOUT NIBLETT, AMONG OTHERS, TELL ME THAT MAGIC IS BACK, THE "BLUE MEANIES" HAVE FLED, AND THAT SOMETHING WONDERFUL MAY BE HAPPENING AGAINI feel I have not liked music very much for a long time. Having been one who experienced the Beatles era -- beginning to the end -- and participated in the "magic" that only existed at that time, when early on, the music that said that we had all the power to make the world what it should be, made everyone I knew feel like they were important and had a role in an incredible time. That changed. And I haven't heard anything that came even close to having any kind of message like that, let alone impact, in the decades then.
Then last year, I came across the music of Scout Niblett, Will Oldham, Daniel Johnston, Songs: Ohia, and other's producing what is called "Indie" (from Independent") genre. Their music did so much for my life and giving me hope about our collective future. I am convinced that Will Oldham is as much a musical genius as Bob Dylan. And I think Scout Niblett is at least as provocative, and authentic; actually more so, in particular in the way she weaves those unique percussive elements into the mix, waking you, almost shaking into you, her message.
My take of Scout's main important sharing, her offering, her reminder to us (especially in a world of obsessive-compulsive everybodys and "Monk") is of the perfection and beauty that is found only in the authentically unpolished, unassuming, and unpretentious. Her work says to me that we are all beautiful in the same way as Nature's own unpolished beauty. She conveys that we are all truly geniuses, or perfect in our uniqueness, or essentially divine, or all of that. But only when we have the courage to give up trying to shape the outcomes of our actions, and to force our wills upon the world instead of flowing with it. She reminds me that we are so much more, and we border every moment the magical, when we dare let ourselves be our slightly worn and unraveled, imperfect but unique, essential selves, relying on the goodness of our divine intuition to direct our actions, foregoing and putting behind us the mental filters that act like so many nagging nannies or parental voices.
I am brought again to remember that being oneself is not only beautiful, but is what brings down the barriers between us all, and thereby helps us to realize our Unity. We see so much fake "beauty" – inhuman, unnatural productions of technicians – a "beauty" that relies on the precisely timed, measured, and symmetrical patterning of auditory elements, copied, as precisely as atoms, or files on a computer, from past creations, Now no longer "alive." Such "music" I've heard, it is astonishing in its familiarity, its sameness, its ability to NOT wake us up. It makes for good office, workshop, or supermarket music, for it soothes us like a familiar heartbeat to a baby. To its "credit," its guaranteed not to disrupt your driving either; and perhaps that's why there's so much of it: Folks living ever more busy and complex lives, how many choose music that might actually shake them up and cause them to lose their footing, in this rat race to a nowhere, disguising itself as survival and endlessly shape-shifting to mimic the meanderings of the victim's thinking, so as not to ever be seen ("Nowhere Man" – The Beatles). So, to busy to even want real music. Yes, that's one big diiference between my generation and what happened afterwards when others were forced to bear higher costs, lower wages, and all the rest, beginning with Reagan's "dawn" in America, the nightmare end of which we are witnessing now. So, this so-called music, may have its roots and its attractions; still, it is a technicians production, not an artist's, and can be produced just as well, and just as inhumanly, by computer programs.
Sadly, I've watched several generations of "musicians," more fearful than they would ever show and lacking true vision or (divine) inspiration, spew out, decade after decade, such melodic or even cacophonic, offerings. Like anything else, there are those who want to be artists (musicians, writers, singers, rock stars), and then there are those who have no choice and must do their art, exercise their unique talent, even if no reward is to be had (remember Mozart died penniless, cast into a pauper's grave). Like Mozart, true genius has no choice.
Scout and Will create perfection in their very insistence on following the razor's edge of the imperfect, the "not cool," even the "inappropriate." Scout, like Oldham, reawakens us to the sublime perfection of the spontaneous and raw tonal pathways, occurring only in the moment, those perfectly askance and glancing, slightly unraveled apparently random, somehow precisely tweaked, purely in the moment intuitive impulses and flashes and even unconscious elements; thus, I hear the channeling of a divine splendor that Scout, for one, could not shake if she tried.
Scout and Will create astonishing audio resting places for the mind, which border on the otherworldly. Quite different from each other are their productions, but equally adept are they in creating the trippy new worlds the lyrics and music weave out of the finer filaments of your mind. The genius of Scout Niblett and Will Oldham lies in their incredible bravery in being truly authentic (not fake authentic; you really see their many facets, which aren't always flattering). And that authenticity comes only out of an incredible willingness to throw oneself directly into the fires of their fears. I could go on, but just to say that that truth comes through like something so true that it partakes of whatever it is that holds us all up and keeps it all together. And that Truth, in which they express themselves, in my opinion is what makes their music more than good, easy on the ears, etc.; it is what takes it beyond music to something magical...
Indeed, like the Beatles did to an entire generation long ago, I came away changed by their music the first time I heard it. I couldn't stop listening all night long, and by the morning I felt I would never be the same again. And I haven't been. Like Barack Obama, Scout Niblett and Wild Oldham also give me the feeling that life is really worth living. That you really do want to hang around in this skin-encapsulated ego for a while. Even if just for the incredibly magical you encounter occasionally.
Friday, March 20, 2009
To Know God, Go to Children, Not Church
It's hard for me to find a greater joy than allowing myself to be a child again among children. Not judging, not being "the authority," being just a friend, children are absolutely delighted when you approach them that way; for it is all they ever wanted of you, to see them as they are -- imperfect and learning -- and not as compared to what they will need to be when they grow up. A lot less teaching; a lot more fun. If you can remember that children are only little friends who simply have less experience in some matters than you, you will view them no differently than a friend who has less experience in some field in which you have lots. And when you can see and approach them that way, you may just hear and see and learn again so many things you wish you'd never forgotten; and you'll remember that when you were a child you had a much more palpable sense of the divinity all around, and within...just like these children have. Being with children is the closest thing I've found to feeling divinity present.
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