Change

 

(This was obviously written right after the first trump presidential election. It’s enough said that though nothing changed in the political environment or the state of the nation since, it gives pause to believing that anything will now.)

Change

 

Change came to Paradise, Ca this month. No one asked for it, no one deserved it, but it happened because it was the Will of God, Mother Nature’s whim, mismanagement of the forests by overdevelopment or ill planning by government agencies, or by just plain dumb, bad luck.

Build it and they will come. That’s our idea of Paradise. Build a senior center, the seniors come. They trust they’ll be taken care of when the time comes. Like parents and their children trust the education system to imbue the children with the proper ideals to make them successful in the real world.

Hard work, knowledge, decent wages, good things should follow along with the good and properly lived life.

Change is good or bad, sometimes at the same time. Dependent on whose perspective, whose purpose.

In 2016 the people of the USA voted Donald Trump into office, according to the constitutional structure designed by Founding Fathers and maintained, redesigned by other men, mostly men.

In 2016, the people of Britain, practically the stepfather of the USA, voted to leave the European Union, which was set up to unite the European block countries in a common currency as well as to make other economic agreements easier.

Major changes. Scotland which has always been at loggerheads with England votes to stay with England rather than be on its own. Right wing dictatorships the USA supports such as Brazil, Phillipines, N.Korea, Honduras, Saudi Arabia, Guatemala, Israel are counter balanced with left/socialist regimes the USA dislikes such as Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, any country friendly to Russia.

Is there any significant differences between any of these countries that would require special considerations based on arbitrARY, assumptive conditions of hostility or friendliness? They, like the USA are all swimming in the same shark infested swamp of patriotic fervor, corruption, nationalism, aggression, and religious fantasy.

All these changes are deserving of our attention and the news gives it to us non-stop, 24 hours, but is any of it really telling us what’s wrong?

We human beings have become the fodder for the cultural, political, and economic wars raging between idealistic and fascist minds who control the wealth or who want to control the wealth.

But that’s only part of it. If we are fodder, then it is our fault. We’ve let it happen. The amorphous, abstract god we originally gave to the churches, priests and religious demagogues to be our connection to our beliefs has been usurped by the nation state. In this day and age, it’s america that carries the mantle of Supremacy. Why do millions of citizens as well as immigrants look to america for relief from their problems and enforcement of their humanitarian rights?

George Santayana’s warning that those who don’t remember their history are bound to repeat it.

The fact that the world, growing as it is, cannot sustain the destruction of resources required to support the american dream, let alone the rest of the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an isolationist, just the opposite. I don’t think a world-wide consortium of wealthy, corporate profit minded masterminds should manage us either.

It’s in us. Our increasing reliance on Drugs, uncontrolled reproduction, accumulation of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, false belief in remedies like wars, sanctions, violence are all ingredients for our destruction as Free beings. If it were just climate, we could survive.

 

 

Drugs.

Being from the 60’s generation where not just marijuana, which has always been around, was acceptable but the acceptance of hallucinogens as contributors to enlightenment, I experimented enough to understand with the type of work I did that being high was not conducive to well- being. There is evidence that many drugs, used properly, can become the tool to enlightenment. It’s interesting that with many things on my list of negatives, the illicit drugs become the outlaw drugs while the “controlled” drugs, those of the government sanctioned pharmaceutical companies are acceptable.

It really is a difference between philosophies. One, used properly, can suggest a movement toward change in one way and the other, a control for things to remain the same.

Drugs and alcohol and the emergence of gangs and military’s forces that control them has brought many countries or certain parts of other countries to a standstill. As with wars and tax laws that have depleted the treasuries, drug enforcement and warfare has exacted a huge toll on the general population. In American and the western societies, the drugs are controlled by the pharmaceutical companies based in a profit motive while the costs of drug rehabilitation and addiction are borne by the society at large, usually through under financed and under manned nonprofits or agencies. Even with that in mind these society orbs are under strict guidelines, strictly controlled and regimented by the very companies and government agencies that are the source of the problem.

 

 Wars

Today’s wars have changed us in a lot of ways we can’t fully understand without at first studying PTSD in the light of not just direct conflict, but the damage inflicted on the human psyche by inference or subjective overexposure to all the political, cultural, and moral implications on warfare which is no longer purely defensive but more offensive in nature. There is an ancient Babylonian axiom that if someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill them first. And that’s why America and many other countries have taken on that role. America sees threats everywhere mostly based on the pseudo truth that Envy makes the world the way it is. It’s an odd principle to believe that those who want more freedom want to come and take ours, like Freedom is some sort of jewel in a museum. America doesn’t really have any more minerals and natural resources than anywhere else yet not having enough of one thing creates a void in our national needs and wants.

According to the costs of war project, the costs and use of oil and petroleum projects alone in the military industrial complex put nearly half of America’s global contribution to climate change.

Not to mention the depletion of monetary resources to the cost of 5.6 trillion, yes trillion. The irony is that progressives who wish things were otherwise are constantly criticized by the powers that be as well as their more common, even decent followers, that the entire repertoire of  progressive thought is detrimental to America’s future, little realizing that even if you don’t believe so much in America’s large contribution to the human caused side of climate change that the way wars are financed has changed so much that the entire burden of financing America’s present wars is a swift way to bring America to bankruptcy, not to mention it comes straight from the wallets and pocketbooks of the lower levels of wage earners through tax cuts for the wealthy and special incentives.

As mentioned above, PTSD puts tremendous pressure on a gun society that fosters the notion that the learned and acceptable way to resolve issues, either at the personal level or at the international level is by a two-thousand-year-old Babylonian axiom. Ironically, the belief that PTSD is only a warfare type of disorder has diminished its true significance, specifically in communities with high rates of poverty, gang/gun violence, and a low safe and secure living environment. Looking at gun use in america one could conclude there is a consensus that anywhere there is a gun, there’s going to be violence.

 

History

One interesting feature of Change is the rewriting of history. We can, if necessary, see that some of the legislation that has befallen upon common citizens, such as tax cuts, came about through several presidents, both democrat and republican, and who have escaped the pointing of fingers because along came trump who like the others just made sure he got his share by upping the ante (by lowering the upper percentage points share). From Clinton, bush, Obama the baton has been passed and perhaps the buddy type of relationships of those past presidents will end with Trump never joining them on the golf course, summits that enjoy.

There is no doubt the history of these United States never quite settles in on specifics but the media, the education system, the politicians continually treat American anomalies, such as offensive war and it’s implied purposeful ethnic and religious cleansing by treating civilian populations as enemy’s ( though to illustrate the difference between us and Them, trump recently said in protecting the crown prince of Saudi Arabia that our agreements are with the Saudi government and not with one person) thus excusing murder in lieu of economic commitments,  racist policies in law enforcement, discriminatory practices in voting rights, to name a few.

It’s also imperative to maintain the past lies as truth. A house of cards in more ways than one.

From above, all hurricanes look alike, such as what Burroughs said…

From above, all hurricanes look alike, such as what Burroughs said about supermarkets, swirling tornadic holes in the clouds,

A recent picture of what I assumed was hurricane Melissa? showed large birds circling above the eye, and some scientists estimated that the photograph depicted through some sort of ratio analysis, that each bird's wingspan must have been a hundred yards across. Quite a wingspan but it does seem right that like birds that encircle the dead, vultures are taking opportunities offered.

Imagine that though. We have entered into a modern version of Greek mythology.

If anyone could retrieve all the information accumulated in any one's mind, man or woman, then would we continue to believe in the monolithic, simplistic understanding of who we are.

The gods created chaos to ameliorate the calm, for both exist in the eye of the hurricane, from which severity and simplicity are born and die.

Sent from my iPad

Trade and Tariffs

 

Pacific Trade Agreement

And all other tariffs included.

It’s not complicated, economics that is. If after a trade agreement, a dairy product corporation in another nation can ship a carton of milk halfway across the world and put it on the shelf in your local grocery store for at least an equivalent cost as a similar local product, then something is wrong. It is that something that's wrong that is the problem.

Rule #1 if something doesn’t make sense, then do nothing about it but don’t let your nation of choice try and do something about it, either.

Rule #2 If something doesn’t make sense, then don’t let someone else who thinks it makes sense try and explain it to you. If you do let them explain it and it still doesn’t make sense but you accept it because you think they should know what they’re talking about, you are suffering from a lack of confidence whereby you will ultimately pay.

Rule #3 It's all about money, getting it, making it, and spending it. No one is thinking of you in any of those processes.

Empathy-Repeat

 

Empathy

 Maybe it's about time you get some.

I have sympathy and i got empathy, too.

the fear in the air is palpable blue.

Paranoia runs its course in America it's true

Like walkin’ down the street hearing people talking to themselves but really, they’re talkin to you.

 

But I can't get angry anymore over and over, the red white and blue, I’m the matador not the inflamed beast you view

It’s not like you don't have my sympathy though I might be screwed up white and regrettably more like you than you’d probably think, or like.

I just can't get angry anymore about who's hating who

I'm getting old, not that much time to relate,

I barely understand my own fate, much less yours

by the time I find what I'm looking for I forgot what I wanted it for.

I know it's not nineteen sixty-eight, blind revolutionary to the core, I had to relearn a normal life, the red and the black, I had their back, but no one, not even you, can travel the swampland of america, without breaking down and throwing up their hands 

but I can't just lay down and take it anymore.

like Fred Hampton took his while he slept.

j Edgar ain't alive anymore, there's a lot of people carrying him inside like there's a lot more of his kind spreading like weeds like johnyappleseed, fifty years in future. history seeds 2025.

cloning as if they all are clowns, going to give less, take more, as more of them/us walk through doors guns ablazin’.

You may be the generation didn't get more what your parents earned from their daily bread, I can see you’re angry about that in your head

You got my sympathies no mistaken about that rap

but I can't just get angry anymore, over and over the same ol’ crap, same reconciliations, same concessions, same compromises and same lying faces.

But then if you go to Istanbul or I would assume anyplace in Africa you'd already know the sky shines on a different set of races, our Great Mothers birthplace, not only all our colors of all our skins, also the disaster from our hatred, from which our fears arise amid our futures born out of disguise into the worlds masquerade.

It looks as if we've all been shuttered and closed for too long a time, dead and dying like n ghost towns, each of us wishing to discover a new pot of gold inside our heads, instead of one last suicidal binge, one last resurrection.

Now that the buffalo no longer roam the home on the range and everything ever known got shot at, rusted out, broken down and blown up, I just can't get angry anymore despite all that, deep down inside I want change, just like you. Look at me now and you'll be looking at you in futures past, I'm your future and you're my past, I need more change than that, I need change, it's me I need to fix, and all the people like me, like you too, change but we all come with dumpster trash and China and Malaysia don't want to take it anymore and the beautiful sea is not shining from all the crap floating like islands waiting to be discovered and preyed upon by building military bases and making whatever lives die out there beyond our grasp.

we haven't found anyone or anything to save us from ourselves, 

Brother and sister we're all the first generation without any illusions, no trust in what came before is delusion, constitution unequal democratic institutions, nothing works as advertised nor for as long nor in case of emergency only seeing if at least one will kill at least one that’s bothering me, what's waking me up sweat, something on my mind, killing sprees. We are what we want to see. Even so yeah, maybe you have my empathy,

Maybe it's about time you got some, too. Or gave some out. Without us getting down on our knees.

We're all the first generation of a great extinction, everyone living out the shelter of dying expectations, everyone dying because our unacceptable pride where everything from the bird in the sky to the fish in the sea, can't we believe it isn't going to end or be rendered null and void, stamped trampled and buried like some sort of spiritual vendetta, the experiment failed, Frankenstein on the rise, more human, less wise, and the list of oppressed gets mentioned at every dawn and sunset, like calls to prayer or a litany that thrives, keeps us energized, that's our dope, man, mantra for the coming slaughter.

It appears that hardly any of their shit they spent so much manipulating us about, convincing us for, selling us what never worked like it was supposed to.

The engineers that built it and the profiteers that changed it, the government's that regulated it, the earth that was destroyed because of it never made us as ecstatic as promised it would.

We’ve been taken for a long ride, like the one out to Pluto to discover it isn't a planet we need to worry about.

like the one ride that convinced us that once we die there's eternal life waiting for us, a long boring choir filled praising of gods glory, instead give me at least what little there is of freedom left on this earth, I’ll take it and go and try to forget what I was taught, I’m going to die before all is lost, and that’s not hope, my friend, that’s the dope fiend talkin, maybe you’ll want to join me, and we can start all over again, rather than trying to keep the dam from busting, we can try and forget all these delusions, illusions they keep killing us with, and figure out how to love and be free without trying and dying over who the authority is going to be in 2025 or anytime.

The fate of the world doesn’t depend on who is elected president but on who are we going to defend and when we get started by not going to the streets but more by what we decide to eat,

I got empathy,

Maybe it’s time you got some too.

And giving a little too.

Before we rise like the tide, your time is done, a vision of justice in one hand, a love of freedom in the other, we will not be alone.

Right now, the American constitution is unrecognizable, which I suppose…

Right now, the American constitution is unrecognizable, which I suppose is only a natural effect or affectation of an aging process mixed with a large amount of puffery Botox and the usual American exceptionalism and hubris overtime. The Supreme Court, whether on a strict diet of legal interpretation solely aimed at defining imaginative and magical unlimited powers for the executive branch is saddled like a ridiculous handmaiden to her master, just like congress is.

They (Supreme Court) as well as others, mostly the unelected viziers or advisors that awaken the Jabba the Hut like King every day from his intellectual and passionless slumber, confronting him with their daily agenda illustrating this neoliberal process quite well, something I may expand on here in a minute or much later.

I'm naive enough, as almost all Americans who have had some real experiences with the democratic processes, such as continually having to vote for the lessor of two very undistinct candidates who supposedly, but do not, represent, two very distinct political parties. Where I go off on a different path from my fello/a compatriots is in the disappointment I've always felt that hardly anyone understands that the two-party system here in America does not come near to representing the complexity of world issues, freedom, or democracy. The world should reflect on these serious contradictive issues rather than being mesmerized by the monotonous incremental philosophical drumbeat of those ideas inspired by uninspirational leaders who already have everything due to their legal abandonment of any moral, emotional or human like emotions or restrictions, regulations for or about the common good, such as utilizing a moral code that does not sanction political corruption and fosters a strict anti-social philosophy which believes in survival of the fittest.

Unfortunately, these usurers, thieves, and political sycophants masquerading as our leaders don't just want a "thank you for your service," and just move on. Eighty-year-old politicians should be done with it and take their wisdom to the podcast to see if they still have any creds. If they do, god bless em.

I wanted to mention something about fascism, a word that in a short period of time has actually taken on real meaning because the Trump administration seems to abide by many of the loose knit transactional destructiveness supporting worldwide principles of "trying out neoliberalism", manufacturing consent, wealth hegemony, acceptable genocidal practices, and a worldwide domination of resource management and human cognitive states.

That's a mouthful, but what I'm getting at is, you can call fascism by its name or call it by its euphemistic, intellectual names, such as neoliberalism, vulture capitalism, any religious or traditional philosophy based on class or race or tradition or wealth supremacy, along with any process such as incremental change through illegitimate power, laws allowing any class, race, or tradition to be exempt from the same laws that govern. All this is fascism. And if any of it looks familiar over time, you can bet it's on the way. It may take years or, in our current time, it may take decades.

Over time, the oppressed, the immigrant turn against themselves. The immigrants of the early nineteen hundreds turn against the immigrants of the nineteen sixties, or the slaveholders of mid-eighteen hundreds turn against the liberators, and the liberators turn against the liberated, everyone caught up in their own circle of hell.

That was the Great America that never existed unless Trump is asking us to contribute to an amusement park. Oh yeah, that's what's in store for Gaza, a playground for the world's elite, something like Atlantic City. Trump's cohorts may as well say "Make America Fascist Again". At least, then, we can believe that some time it wasn't a complete failure. That at one time America was more benevolent than it is today. There have been opportunities to move America out of the medieval world of competitiveness between kingdoms, religious warfare, class warfare, sexual deviancy, international cruelty, economic slavery or serfdom, and total acceptance of a philosophy, which is what it is, a belief among those in power that humans, by their very nature, aren't deserving enough to ask for equality nor demand for justice nor expect honesty.

We don't have to kill them, torture them, especially if we don't know them, all of them.

All we have to do is expect them to be honest when we can see where they aren't honest. Demand justice for those who aren't honest. Ignore those who use their authority to lie. Isolate those who treat the common good poorly while they make themselves rich from your labor and survival. We have to turn our backs on them, shame them. Defeat them.

Sent from my iPad

The Women of Great Men

 

Beautiful Exiles by Meg Waite Clayton and The Women by T.C. Boyle

These two books illustrate the commonality of great men and the women who love them, in both negative and positive ways/

 

Them

the men

they need you.

Ernest and Meg, 

You two were born like romeo and juliet

amongst the divisive rubble and struggle for Spain.

Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney

You were the other two born in the panic, there was nothing to come home to except smoke and mirrors.

In wars, the great romantics, the swelling pride of it, their work is always so important, so so important and every one of you, mistress or wife, understands that.

You nourish his fear like a wet nurse, you bear his desires like an Olympus hero. 

He languishes when you aren’t there. 

For you are his ghostly inspiration, his spectral muse,

He needs you where he can easily find you.

Cuba, war, Idaho, war, Cuba, war, the memories of Spain kept you going, together, driving like some deep- throated engined plow, push past the lonely days, months, years between you, opened up as precisely as a surgeon’s knife,

When it is best and the difference of what it is between now and never you must tread.

Without the inclusion of time, we all can live forever

He always had the fire to remember the murders, the charred desolation of guilt because he wasn’t there. His beloved Taliesin and you,

Taken away, of the two, only you could not be replaced.

 

Here we are so contained in our own stories, looking inside ourselves for the things to hold on to when we are drowning in our time.

Meg, it was on the way back to him from Italy. He called you there.  He begged you back to Cuba and you came with all your memories.

Momah, Your ghost interrupted him, beckoned him from Chicago, he drives all night in the rain, that failing hope wasn't enough to douse the flaming slaughter.

The good and the bad,

The end pummeling you into submission.

There is nothing there waiting for any of you.

You are sure of it when you see them, her and him, laughing and drunk, just like the wars when you mastered him/

The rendezvous,

the love,

they always love you until they don't.

When that final moment gets to you, it's never clear when that started.

Fire always leaps to its hunger like a new lover, voracious and hard to satiate,

Once it starts, it’s hard to keep down the thrill of it consuming everything you once loved- the bottlebrush by the sea, the quaint villages amongst the pine, it's smoky clarity, your fresh Sprite of hells delight ignites.

It all retreats to the safety of ignominy.

Fw: israel man eaters

Netanyahu must have been drinking that desalinized water.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/sharks-from-species-once-thought-harmless-kill-and-eat snorkeler-in-feeding-frenzy/ar-AA1OWZdz?ocid=socialshare