POEM:  Ode to Navigation   (2017Aug26)

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Saturday, August 26, 2017                                                7:58 PM

Ode to Navigation

 

Gusts of emotions push me askew and awry

No star or sun do guide me across the sky

The yaw and roll of time and heart

The mystery of end and start

Awash on a quantized sea, afoam with tessellations

Sighting a castled isle, athwart with crennelations

Spraying up flumes of probability

Dashing upon the rocks of mortality

Knowing that my past had got the best of me

Leaving the rest of me

Sailing into the dusk of danger and death

Parsing the delta twixt fact and faith

Pressing the limits of love unboundeth

Hiking the summit of truth and grace.

A Lover of History   (2017Aug26)

BoucherAllegoryOMusic

Saturday, August 26, 2017                                                3:30 PM

A Lover of History   (2017Aug26)

I’m not a believer, but I sing “God Bless America” just as loud as anyone else—I love this country. And I admire its greatness—its ideals, its inventions, its victories, and its opportunities. When Trump says MAGA, he simply reveals his ignorance of America’s true and enduring greatness—something he has continued to do for over 200 days now.

America is a dream dreamt by most of the rest of the world—not the land, but the culture of freedom and inclusion and opportunity—that’s America’s greatness—and ironically, it is threatened by the very con-man who ran on MAGA. Big surprise, right?

But I don’t want to discuss that blimp today. I want to talk about seeing America with open eyes—seeing that, in spite of its many achievements, there is plenty to regret in its bloody and divisive history. We are currently at war with a country that surrendered to us sixteen years ago—and at war with another group borne of the fighting—that’s some sad, stupid shit.

But America’s history is not a pretty picture. Those of us with the luxury to sit around and post online all day, with a fridge full of food and an electrified house and good roads—we tend to forget that it took over four hundred bloody, horrifying years to get here—and if we’re not mindful, it will all go down the drain.

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First, we killed off all the innocent native people, who lived here before we ‘discovered’ it. Then we set to shipping as much of the natural spoils (fur pelts, lumber, new products) as possible back to Europe. Britain and Europe sent criminals and refugees off to our country—just to remove such people from the civilized world.

Okay, that was glib—but let me just say that I still respect Americans who take pride in their pioneer and settler forebears—that process was a grueling one, demanding incredible courage and sacrifice. But it was also a bloody one—and the pioneers were, from the aboriginal viewpoint, merciless invaders.

Even when native Americans surrendered to the ‘civilized’ white people, it was always a lie—the colonists and later, the United States, would always make a binding pledge to their captives—and then turn around and break it—always. If one is proud of one’s heritage, it’s always dangerous to examine that history too closely.

Further, let me point out, the Europeans prized furs and lumber because they had denuded the European landscape of same—even without the benefit of industrial technology, human beings, like goats, can destroy an ecosystem simply by living there.

Also, the vast majority of immigrants (colonists) being criminals and refugees made for a rather anti-establishmentarian culture in the North American part of the ‘New World’. Eventually, we rebelled against the Church, the King, and wrote Founding Documents that specifically direct the citizens to keep firearms and rise up against the government again—whenever we weren’t happy with the people in charge. And people wonder why the United States has ten or twenty times the annual gunshot deaths of the rest of the world combined.

So, that’s just for starters—then we started kidnapping Africans, shipping them to America and making slaves of them. It seemed like a great idea at the time, I’m sure—but, in hindsight, it had a few problems. And slavery was the worst of it—but it was far from all of it.

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The white, English-speaking Protestants (along with the Dutch in New York) have always exuded a pompous, entitled discrimination against anyone from out of town—like Peyton Place people. They persecuted the Asian immigrants, the Irish immigrants, the Scandinavian immigrants, the Italian immigrants, the Polish immigrants, the Jewish immigrants, the Indian immigrants—I know I’m leaving a few out—Americans love their pet peeves.

Nor is this ancient history—as a child, I remember people discussing whether an Irish Catholic (John F. Kennedy—and me) could ever be elected president of the United States. But African-Americans still win—white America has, somehow, made a fetishistic art-form out of hating African-Americans.

We’re the only country with an entire region characterized by a nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of African-Americans in chains. We’ve had a hundred years of ‘the first Black this’ or ‘the first Black female that’—and you’d think Barack Obama’s two terms would put a period to all that, but no—there’s still some slots open for discriminating white people to take note of.

We even have a white nationalist movement—right now—that sees a leveled playing field as ‘reverse racism’—these are many of the same yahoos that complain that our religious-freedom-laws are an imposition on the freedom of their religion—no one has the heart to explain to these morons that that’s what it’s for.

But all the above is just human nature—we haven’t even started on how greed (aka Capitalism) has transformed our environment, our lives, and our laws—even our elections. But pollution, corruption, neglect, and community apathy are all much too complex, ingrown, and depressing for me to go into here and now.

All I’m saying is that America is neither simple nor easy, neither perfect nor perfectly evil—it is a struggle, a moral experiment, a system that bets on good against bad. It is complicated enough that sloppy-thinking, ignorant people like our president just get in the way of people of good will—the entitlement that makes them ignorant of our true character is the same entitlement that makes them a danger to the character of our nation.

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greatshakes

Practical Solutions   (2017Aug25)

bible4

Friday, August 25, 2017                                           2:55 PM

Ah, the beauty—the delicacy and iridescence of a lawn on a dewy morn, the awesome compulsion of a baby’s grin, the warm softness in the breast upon hearing soulful, nostalgic music—these are the moments that we are deprived of during a crisis. In an emergency everything’s business—get it done or someone may be hurt—no time for dawdling. Hurry, hurry—we don’t have time for nonsense.

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But face it—9/11 is really 9/11/2001—it was sixteen years ago—I think we can stop panicking now. No one can minimize the horror of the event—and I wouldn’t even want to try. But as far as how we live our lives in 2017—I think it’s long past time we calmed down, did some yoga breathing, and took stock of how many mistakes we have made.

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First of all, that Bin-Laden bastard planned more than the plane attacks—he hoped that the US would do exactly what it did—panic, overreact, start expensive wars that would increase division and hurt our diplomatic standing in the world, while they drained our coffers and goosed our national debt. And Bush-43 gave him more than he dreamed—a near re-run of the Great Depression, and hundreds of thousands of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Besides all of that, we have this Putin bastard, who is the only world leader thuggish enough to be the first to invade sovereign territory of a neighboring country since Hitler’s defeat. Then he starts disruption campaigns against democratic countries—and I don’t think I need to remind you that democracies work badly enough without disruption.

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He scored big with a disinformation campaign against Hillary Clinton so effective that even her supporters started to doubt themselves—and he got bonus points for opening the door to the most disgraceful president this country ever had the shamelessness to elect (collegiately—if it had been a majority vote, our disgrace would have been complete).

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Putin managed to cheat us out of another four years of Obama-like governance and a wily, strong opponent against him on the world stage—how that fucker must have danced when he realized he was getting to deal with Puddin-head Donny-John instead!

Of course, your internet feed may sell you a different story—a story wherein everything I’ve just said is a bunch of bull and I am a deluded snowflake. And that is the last mistake I’ll address today—all the governmental, judicial, administrative, financial mistakes will have to wait for some other time. We have made the mistake of letting ourselves become divided—the Internet’s business plan of ‘customized filtering’ has put each of us in our neat little pigeonholes for counting and sorting.

We need a focal point. And it’s not just the internet either—journalists in both print and television have been shunted into the for-profit side of printing and broadcasting. Or, it might be more straightforward to say that there is no longer any room in modern businesses for a non-profit section.

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Our present greed is too ferocious to allow such waste of business effort as to serve the public. Besides, nowadays, the whole point of owning a media empire is to become the iron fist that chokes off free speech to his or her own personal satisfaction—then lets the rest through, so you can’t tell anything’s missing.

So we have developed both the internet and the mass media in purely commercial ways so far—and they no longer serve the public, either. Plus, we have, on the one hand, made the internet increasingly important, to where our civilization might collapse without it, and on the other hand we freely admit that there’s no such thing as a secure internet—that a hacker, or group of hackers, could wreak havoc on the global community with a few buttons pushed. Now, I like online as much as the next guy—but there’s such a thing as ‘too good to be true’, too.

So, we have made a lot of mistakes lately. And even if we didn’t make those mistakes ourselves, we all still have to live with the consequences of the above mistakes. And we have to find solutions to those mistakes. But most of all, we have to start thinking, real thinking—not discussions and debates between two sides of trivial differences, but practical solutions to real problems.

You know, like grown-ups.

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Media Milquetoasts   (2017Aug24)

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Thursday, August 24, 2017                                               4:29 PM

Media Milquetoasts   (2017Aug24)

As we know, Trump has a fetish for “I know you are, but what am I?” During the campaign, Trump echoed every accusation HRC made against him: unfit, corrupt, collaborator with Russians, using charity for personal gain, etc. Every time Hillary described an aspect of Trump, he found some paper-thin rationale to throw the accusation right back in her face.

The media, instead of reporting on his fetish for “I know you are, but what am I?”, decided to run every statement he made, as if he had as much reason to say it as she did, even though he had never said anything about any of these things, until someone with a sharp mind had thought them up.

Then, after those countless PR ‘gimme’s, they had to report some facts about Trump lying. Then he, of course, called them liars and ‘fake news’—and, instead of filing a slander lawsuit against him, the media reported on his ‘fake news’ statements, as if he had as much reason to say it as they had, even though he had never said anything about any of these things, while the media had been playing for his side.

Today I felt the assholery peaking at maximum—Trump isn’t just mirroring his critics anymore—his latest psycho-reversal: explaining stupid to smart people. He and his cronies are following up his recent word-salad public statements with commentary about how it all makes a sly kind of sense, if you look at it from Trump’s point of view. Sorry, BLOTUS—‘five dimensional chess’ is just a buzzword, meaning: you’ve crawled so far up your own ass that you can’t back out.

Yet, still, the media hops onboard with the agenda-setter-in-chief—never mind the real actions and consequences happening behind the scenes of this apocalyptic presidency—let’s just keep re-tweeting him and his friends. Sure, that sounds about right…yeah, sure. Besides, real journalism has that pesky ‘work’ element to it—eh?

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Time To Start Shouting Back   (2017Aug23)

Beatrice

Wednesday, August 23, 2017                                           1:25 AM

Time To Start Shouting Back   (2017Aug23)

We need to come together and work as one to defeat the forces arrayed against our future—and people are usually rallied by the naming of an enemy—by putting a face to our misery and fear. Politics just is that way—no matter whether it’s an election, a tax, a new law, or a war—you have to name the devil if you want everyone to join you in condemning it.

It doesn’t have to be one person—you can point the finger at a group—that’s actually more effective, because it makes a scarier image in our heads. Or you can name an idea or a sub-culture as the dangerous menace—those are handy because one can twist them to include anyone who annoys you. But I have never held by that—I have always seen individuals as more or less good, and without any great deal of time being spent on the judgement.

People talk about the importance of first impressions—and then mention a hat or a pair of shoes—which I think misses the point. When I first meet someone, we look each other in the eye, we exchange names—speak to each other, probably even shake hands. While we do this, we take in the totality of each other—height, build, posture, clothing, body language, voice, vocabulary, and on ad infinitum. I believe you can meet someone, then spend a few years with them, and not know much more about their character after those few years than you did at that first meeting.

Thus I snap to quick judgements about people’s characters—not that they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people, necessarily—I don’t mean to sound crazy. I’m talking about the things that stand out on a person—the things that can’t be faked or hidden by any average person. Studious people present as studious—irritable crab-apples present as irritable crab-apples—naïfs cannot be mistaken for sophisticates, nor dull folk for wits. The vast majority of people are not even a little mysterious.

It’s a two-way street, too—other people have sized me up in the blink of an eye, all my life—and why not? I talk and act exactly like I am—my only problem is most people disapprove of what they see in me—a bookworm, who’s quick to criticize others and slow to examine himself. Hey, no one’s perfect—and my book-larnin’ does come in handy, every now and then. The truth is, I dislike being disliked for being an egghead—it’s just sour grapes—it’s not like I was born to love reading and learning just to show up other people.

But enough about me. We were discussing naming, as an enemy, a public figure or a group or a sub-culture. And I was trying to say that I think such primitive reactionism is beneath us—we should be able to see people as the individuals each one of us clearly are.

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There are not more good people than bad in the world, there are not more smart people than ignorant people—there just aren’t. We have always gotten by with having enough good, smart people to talk the rest of us into doing the right thing—and, up until now, our President was hoped to be one of those people.

And our dark-side president is not a fatal blow—just a fever symptom caused by a lot of dark-side, doggedly ignorant supporters voting for him, and a dark-side, win-‘though-the-country-fails Congress that still supports this human insult of a president. Evil has been shouting at the top of its lungs since the 80’s in this country—while good people have quietly tried to maintain peace and stability.

Well, peace and stability are long gone—it’s time for good people to do a little shouting. If your dander isn’t already up yet, get’er revved—the most important lesson of Hitler was that there’s a time for people of good will to get angry, and to act—and the sooner it comes, the less blood will spill. Waiting until it’s a World-War-sized problem is just bad business.

I have a dream—a dream that one day, Trump will hold a rally—and thousands and thousands of people will come—but not one of them will go inside the venue, they’ll just be picketing outside. I just love the image of that blowhard trying to bullshit an empty stadium.

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Fate Steps In   (2017Aug19)

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Seneca lunching across from Danny Glover

Saturday, August 19, 2017                                                3:07 PM

Fate Steps In   (2017Aug19)

The media has a bad habit of equalizing two ‘sides’ of an issue, even when it is pretty clearly a matter of right vs. wrong being the two ‘sides’. But fate continues in its old, natural way—as time passes, those on the left tend to rise in our esteem, and increase in dignity—those who most vocally support the far right tend to fall to scandal, or even criminal charges and prison sentences. This is such a common occurrence on the right that there have been cases of Republicans running for office while standing trial, or even serving time.

Thus the media can equalize all it wants, and muddy the waters of public perception, if they must mock true journalism in this way. But fate will ultimately deal with either side as it has always done. Evil never rests—but that is the beauty of it: evil disrupts everyone, including the unethical. As they fight to enrich themselves through the sacrifice of others, the same amorality bedevils their efforts—just as it does our own. Ain’t that a pip?

The champions of love and inclusion and acceptance—these people naturally attract supporters, and are keeping their eyes on a prize other than their bank accounts . The hate-group members live in such a way as to narrow their community and repel sensible people. And we humans are such silly people that it is a lucky thing that the universe works in this way. Look how we totter on the edge of disaster—even with everything in our favor (except the present government, perhaps).

The Art of the Lie   (2017Aug19)

SimonLegree

Saturday, August 19, 2017                                                2:17 AM

The Art of the Lie   (2017Aug19)

You have to give the alt-right credit for being creative liars—even unto what the science-fiction writers refer to as ‘world building’, where they create a planet that is like Earth, but with some major differences.

In the same way, the alt-right is heavily invested in trying to get us all to perceive reality through their own special filter (which removes pesky ideas such as inclusion, human rights, the dignity of the individual, etc.) and simplifies everything down to ‘us vs. them’ and ‘the one with the most money makes the rules’.

Take Steve Bannon—on leaving the Administration he boasted that they had achieved the Trump presidency they wanted, and that from now on, it would be a ‘different presidency’. Would that it were true. The truth, however, is that the presidency is the mess is started out as—and nothing changed except that Bannon lost his job.

But nothing beats Trump for lying. He invented the term ‘alt-left’ during his Tuesday nazi-rally/press-conference, in a stunning attempt to both equalize the Nazi marchers and the counter-protestors—and to pigeonhole any of the vast majority of good Americans who dare to speak against white supremacy, with a dismissive nickname. The truth is, there is no ‘alt-left’—it was an inspired piece of lying by the president—but the 90% of Americans who understand the character of our nation do not call themselves by that label—nor does anyone else.

Thus the question arises—which is crazier: to suffer from delusions or to make a career out of attempting to delude the public? And we can add to that another question: With Trump’s brain so busy churning out moment-by-moment revisions of reality, isn’t it likely that he may himself be sadly unclear about what is real and what is the lie?

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Hurry Up, Mr. Mueller   (2017Aug18)

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Friday, August 18, 2017                                           3:50 PM

323,000,000 people live in the United States—61.3% white—that comes to 198,000,000—which leaves 125,000,000 non-white. Anyone preaching division in our country is trying to cause trouble—period.

Human nature is such that any form of institutionalized division, even so-called ‘separate but equal’, will lead us down a path that can only end in persecution, slavery, or genocide. And America is uniquely vulnerable to this abhorrent rationale, being a melting pot, and having hundreds of millions of people from every corner of the earth—every race, every color, every religion, every orientation. If we start to tear ourselves apart, we’d make our first civil war look like a tea party.

So, anytime someone tries to sell you on division or hatred, they’re really encouraging you to partake in a bloodbath. They want your blood to spill. Oh, they’re nice enough about it—all reasonable and logical sounding at first. But their bottom line is death—for ‘many sides’, as the orange fool would say.

In the land of equality, when people claim others are unequal—they are the problem, not the others they’re so aroused about. By their logic, writ large, if any one person on earth committed a crime, we should all be in jail. That’s a lovely fantasy, I suppose—but this Nazism thing is often a symptom of a more general mental mistake—trying to rationalize things into what one already believes them to be, or what one wishes things could be, instead of taking them as they are (as godawful messy as that may be).

So, hurry up, Mr. Mueller. I think Congress is about ready to impeach—as soon as you can tell them just how horrible the whole back-room story is, they’ll no longer have any defense as to why they still sit on their hands while an egomaniac ruins our country.

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Dear White Nationalists   (2017Aug15)

Tuesday, August 15, 2017                                       10:06 PM

Dear White Nationalists: You are wrong. You are not another side of an issue—you are just wrong. You are not better than any other group—you are just less self-controlled, willing to kick at the pricks because it makes you feel important.

Your leaders have written whole libraries of books attempting to justify your ignorance. All those books are wrong. (O—and, not for nothing, the fucking Shoah happened—don’t be an asshole—and never forget.) Please free feel to return to the American side of this controversy—‘acceptance’ even includes ex-neo-nazis.

You are seeing change. You’re becoming a minority—and that frightens you. It shouldn’t—the rules of love work both ways, if only you would open up your eyes.

And, by the way, while you remain a white nationalist, I hope you are aware of being a disruptive tool of the money-grubbers and the power-hungry—that’s you. You are what stands between them and close scrutiny—something bad people rarely stand up to and will do anything to divert our attention from—including riling up a bunch of unhappy yahoos (no offense).

You don’t deserve special consideration. You can be stupid—I mean bigoted—in the privacy of your own property. You can even have meetings of like-minded stupid—sorry, bigoted—folks in your living room. But if you go out on a street corner and exercise your right to free speech, don’t be surprised if someone punches you in the face—it might even be me.

Understand, please—we are not violent people. But when you preach sin right on Main Street, in front of our families and children, we’re going to beat the crap out of you. That is not, as our bloated leader would have it, violence on both sides. This is a natural and instinctive reflex you will witness in every American—we have fought both civil and foreign wars against this shit. Freedom of speech aside, if you’re going to preach murder, gang-rape, or bigotry in public, Americans will just naturally beat the crap out of you. I’m surprised you don’t know that.

I guess it’s all the kids these days fixating on their cellphones, ignoring what’s going on around them—but, still, if I was you, I wouldn’t get’em pissed off enough to stop texting—you don’t want that. I don’t want that. Nobody wants that.

So—here’s what you do. If there’s a library in your town, why don’t you pop in there and read a book? Read two—what the hell. You may not find the book that explains how ignorant it is to be a white nationalist right away—but while you’re reading, you’re not out in public, making an ugly ass out of yourself. I’m surprised your parents didn’t bother to teach you better.

Crisis of Controversy   (2017Aug07)

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Sunday, August 06, 2017                                         4:22 PM

Crisis of Controversy   (2017Aug07)

I just watched a report on the opioid crisis—our country is being decimated by it. In a way, the opioid crisis is the natural next step, after sixteen years of fear-mongering and internecine bickering in our politics. Politicians rang that “post-9/11 threat level” like a cowbell, keeping the entire country on tenterhooks for years, starting reflex-wars that still haven’t ended. People are fleeing the pain and negativity in many ways—opioids being just one, our present clown-presidency being another, desperate example of wishful thinking.

This country has finally run low on the only thing it always had too much of: Morale. Our chants of “USA! USA!” have a hollow ring to them, as if we were clapping for Tinkerbell’s life. We need another Franklin D., to re-teach us that we have nothing to fear except being afraid. And we certainly need some retro (i.e. fit for the office) president to come in and point this country towards the future again. These wealthy, corrupt elites are like fifth columnist agitators, who start a riot—just to provide cover for their looting and violence.

Our government is not some special reality show being broadcast on special channels—it is, at root, a fairly straightforward affair, that people of good will conducted poorly—but still, it was better than these soulless people now making a rat’s nest of neglect and privilege out of offices they’re not fit to fill. It is unfortunate that journalism has spawned two idiot half-brothers, Click-bait and the 24-hour News-cycle.

These new industries thrive on our disruption, confusing the needful work of a free press with entertaining gossip and hypotheticals—exacerbating problems under the guise of ‘providing information’, mixing the opinion-based editorializing and spin with the hard news. The ‘information’ thus provided uses the term so loosely that it impacts peoples’ faith in the real journalists—who are then vulnerable to accusations of ‘fake news’ from the dick-head-in-chief.

Someone like Trump finds a friend in these outlets—but they provide no assistance to any serious public servant who isn’t prepared to vamp for the ratings. The neo-realisti-cons have even carved out a demographic convinced that their propaganda is an alternative to the reporting in the NY Times or the Washington Post. And while journalists clearly are not famous for their precision, the journalism practiced at those papers is far more rigorous and objective than the Foxified alt-reality.

As always, there’s a dead giveaway, if you know where to look—I’ll give you a hint: it’s in the retractions. A paper like the Times will print a retraction at the drop of a hat—if an error of fact is pointed out to them, they will correct their error without a second thought.

A salient feature of the alt-right ranters, including Fox News, is their instinct to debate a refutation—they grasp their ‘facts’ to themselves much more tightly than an objective journalist. In their very rare instances of being forced into a retraction—it’s always partial, conditional, mealy-mouthed, unapologetic, and dismissive of the whole affair once it goes counter to their wishes. That’s a far cry from even an attempt at objectivity—and a sign of their ignorance, that they haven’t the good grace to be ashamed of such transparent mendacity.

It’s a tricky thing to call them out on—their bad impression of real journalists is an insult to ideal of journalism, and of being a journalist—but it passes muster for the distracted, upset viewers it’s targeted towards, so it works for them—when it really should have made them a disgraced laughingstock.

You know why Bernie is a Socialist? Do you know why we need socialism in America today? It’s because Capitalism has been gamed to such an extent that only some aggressive spread-the-wealth programs have any chance of stopping our slippery slide into a Cash Dictatorship. If we can’t find a way to deke all these lobbyists and campaign-contributors, we’ll never rescue our democracy from the banks and the fat-cats.

Wanted: Quiet Folk   (2017Aug10)

Improv – Glamorous Air

Thursday, August 10, 2017                                               1:53 PM

Wanted: Quiet Folk   (2017Aug10)

Are we done having fun yet? It’s been wild, having a nutjob for president, but now that everyone is losing sleep over nuclear Armageddon, from an off-the-cuff remark he thoughtlessly made, isn’t it time we impeached this senile abortion and got a real president?

Democracy without compromise is simply the tyranny of the majority. We allow the majority to elect our officials, but those officials are meant to serve everyone, whether they voted for or against. That is a complex position to be put in—but don’t worry: corruption has dumbed the whole thing down to just ‘getting re-elected’.

Improv – Cuddle Closer

Americans should get back to doing big things for a reason other than profit. The Hoover Dam, the Highway System, the Railroads, the Space Station—Americans used to build great things for the sheer greatness of them. We don’t do that now—but only because we are too distracted to think of it. It makes us small, brings us all down in the mud of money, where the shills have all the power.

The fat gas-bag in the Oval—he infuriated me when he said, “Make America great again”, not simply because he dismissed our present greatness, but redefined our future greatness in terms of dollars and cents—the cad. He should never have been elected—and the fact that he was proves that this country’s greatness, as an ideal, has eluded not just Trump, but a good solid third of the electorate.

Improv – Blue Ballet

So the question arises—how do we convince Americans that they still live in a great country—for reasons that are staring them in the face—when they are so unhappy they can’t appreciate what we have here? One thing we could do is set all the television shows in foreign countries—remind Americans that, here, we are required by law to send our children to school—boys and girls. Remind them of the many ways America is a great place to live—that we don’t use our police as instruments of political oppression—that the vast majority of our cops are public servants, making their neighborhoods safe and just.

Our parochial experiences minimize the truth of this—there are countless protections and freedoms that are not givens, as they are here, in other parts of the world. Theoretically, we make our own laws and choose our own leaders—and it seems apparent that we have to face up to it: We have not been careful stewards of that hard-won privilege. We have become comfortable in the assumption that these freedoms can’t be taken away. We have to start running and voting—and in an informed way that moves us towards solutions to our problems.

The greatest Capitalist, Henry Ford, paid his factory workers high wages, so that they could buy one of the cars they were making. Ford was creating a product and a market at the same time. He wasn’t some present-day fool who saw no connection between business and people. The old saw, ‘You have to spend money to make money’ is most true of governments—this Republican push for ‘independence’ of the individual is just one-percenter propaganda—as if, in the age of global interconnectedness.

We have to grab our citizenship by the throat and wrestle that thing back to what it was intended to be—self-government by majority vote. In my mind, the issues that bedevil us are no longer the problem—at this point, the problem is the issues never get taken care of. We need to elect people who will shut the hell up and do something constructive. Godamit.

Pete n’ Me – Improv – Considering

 

No Time Off For Rachel   (2017Aug02)

Monday, July 31, 2017                                             4:15 PM

In Post   (2017Jul31)

Post-project depression—it’s an old friend—the deeper I dive into making something, the more invested I get, the sharper the jolt of being dumped back on the sidewalk, project-less. Sure, I’m really just between the end of one endeavor and the beginning of the next. But at that moment of cathartic, exhaustive completion, the distance from where I am—to some future point where I will again have the mental effervescence and strength of will to start a new thing—seems like an impossible distance.

It’s a low point in my process—hence the depression, I suppose. But in general I really appreciate that cyclical aspect of things. I love the way it seems as if I can hardly move, hardly open my eyes—almost dying—every night—and then wake up every morning just full of energy. It’s so cool—it’s like magic. I mean—I get the eating food for fuel and getting energy from that. But to be recharged overnight by Sleeping—that’s just very cool and mysterious.

The track coach used to chide me about stopping once I reached the anaerobic burn phase—they call it a ‘second wind’. (It’s a great sensation—all of a sudden, the muscles stop the burning ache and you feel turbocharged—but it really means that your muscles have stopped burning oxygen normally—they’ve switched to a faster, but more toxic, anaerobic process. This floods the muscles with poisons, so, if you keep running on a ‘second wind’, you can seriously hurt, or even kill, yourself.)

But it was hard to give it up—once I was in that moment, after many hard laps, suddenly granted a ‘power-up’ that made me feel superhuman—I always struggled with myself to let it go. I even enjoyed waking up all stiff the next day and having to move around for a while before I could loosen up. I’m not sure I remember it properly, but I think we spent most of our childhood with aching muscles from the non-stop moving and doing.

rachel-maddow

Wednesday, August 02, 2017                                           1:27 AM

No Time Off For Rachel   (2017Aug02)

One good thing about post-project depression—it passes quickly. I feel normal today, no great high or low, just steady. I was saved, in a way, from starting something right away (it’s always best to take a metaphorical breath before you start something completely new) by my camera dying. It’s recharged now—but the world will never know how I played this morning—it sounded okay, some of it—but I always think that, so I’ll never know without a recording.

But I’m not the only one with problems. A few Republicans are starting to say things that oddly resemble things I wrote in my blog-posts, last summer—about how Trump makes a terrible president, so bad a president that we’d be safer if he spent four years without leaving the golf course. I felt bad when he won the Electoral College—so they can suck it up and feel even worse, knowing that they’re on his team and they’re just now realizing what a mistake that was.

For educated people, there are values to America that have nothing to do with business or profit. Even if they spend all day in finance or commerce, they realize that all this free enterprise depends on a respect for the whole system—if civility collapses, the value of money is the first casualty. But Trump is an ignorant bully who believes that all of that is hogwash. Trump admires Putin for being ‘strong’ enough to have his political opponents murdered. That’s the kind of stupid we’re stuck with.

So, I’d say we all have some worries. My granddaughter has a slight fever—she’s been given a little grape-flavored Tylenol or something, and she’s being a very brave baby. Jessy says she has the same cold—poor Seneca has two sick girls on his hands. I hope his health holds out.

There were three obit-notices on Facebook today—it is simply not a good day. And I understand that this clown-car administration has journalists running themselves ragged—but why would they call it the Rachel Maddow Show and then let her take a vacation—and in the middle of summer—it’s just crazy, right?

(Joy-Ann Reid–I love you too–I’m just joking.)