Dark Age Ahead

[willoweyes]

The inestimable Jane Jacobs heard the title to this thread first, not I.

I am not a doomsayer--as someone else said, ""When you are standing at the edge of a precipice, the only sensible step is a step backward."

I think if our race steps back from this precipice, we can still avoid a horrible day of reckoning/

Here, in part, is what the Kunstlermeister had to say on June 23, 2008,

The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

"Penetration"

by James Howard Kunstler

". . . .All this reality content [debt, oil demand, changing climate, etc.] is beginning to penetrate the collective consciousness in the US, but the result is mostly panic or paralyzed disbelief rather than any set of intelligent responses. For example, I got a call from one of Katie Couric's producers at CBS news on Friday. Somehow, they had noticed that oil prices were becoming a problem in America. They called me for a comment. The scary part was they were clearly treating the issue as a "lifestyle" story. Did I think more suburbanites would move downtown? And would that be a good thing...? They have no fucking clue how broadly and deeply these dynamics will affect the life of this nation, or even our ability to remain a nation. Also, by the way, this demonstrates how the nightly network news has become the equivalent of the old "women's pages" of the daily newspapers.
The parallel universe of the financial world is showing the strain of all this oil anxiety -- since, after all, oil is the primary resource for running industrial economies. It has been some time since the banker boyz embarked on their fateful venture to alchemize a new mutant strain of investment instruments to replace the tired old stocks and bonds which represented the hope for production of surplus wealth from industrial activity -- now mooted by the oil story. The idea of the mutant investments was to produce wealth with no real wealth-producing activity. This old trick, formerly known as Ponzi finance or a "pyramid scheme," was naturally self-limiting, and in a way that would prove ultimately very destructive to society as a whole. In fact, it has fatally undermined the legitimacy of the entire financial system, and a state of comprehensive nausea has set in as we all witness the dissolving foundation of the US economy under a tsunami of debt that will never be repaid.
The markets seem to know this, the more vocal playerz are squawking more about it, some banks are issuing frightening "duck-and-cover" warnings, using horror movie phrases such as "...worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s..." and the general public is sinking into the quicksand of bankruptcy, repossession, and ruin. I haven't been to any lawn parties in the Hamptons this year, but I imagine that eczematous anxiety rashes are competing with suntans and Versace separates out there this year. Really, we're right back where we were last year about this time, only worse. Oil has doubled, food is outasight, the levees have broken, the people who run things are shitting their pants, and everybody is waiting for a whole lotta other shoes to drop.":twisted:

[sidecross]

18% of Americans argue that the sun revolves around the Earth.

We are the chain and as strong as our weakest links.

[Somantics]

t's a shame ignorance is so pervasive in the United States as it is here in the British Isles.

However the tone of the argument has now changed and anybody and everybody who has half a clue must start planning for some pretty leftfield scenarios to unfold...

it is a strange time - things seem static but momentum is building.

[sidecross]

Surviving the Fourth of July

by Chris Hedges

I survive the degradation that has become America — a land that exalts itself as a bastion of freedom and liberty while it tortures human beings, stripped of their rights, in offshore penal colonies, a land that wages wars defined under international law as criminal wars of aggression, a land that turns its back on its poor, its weak, its mentally ill, in a relentless drive to embrace totalitarian capitalism — because I read books. I have 5,000 of them. They line every wall of my house. And I do not own a television.

I survive the gradual, and I now fear inevitable, disintegration of our democracy because great literature and poetry, great philosophy and theology, the great works of history, remind me that there were other ages of collapse and despotism. They remind me that through it all men and women of conscience endured and communicated, at least with each other, and that it is possible to refuse to participate in the process of self-annihilation, even if this means we are pushed to the margins of society. They remind me, as the poet W.H. Auden wrote, that “ironic points of light flash out wherever the Just exchange their messages.” And if you tire, as all who can think critically must, of the empty cant and hypocrisy of John McCain and Barack Obama, of the simplistic and intellectually deadening epistemology of television and the consumer age, you can retreat to your library. Books were my salvation during the wars and conflicts I covered for two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans. They are my salvation now. The fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our existence are laid bare when we sink to the lowest depths. And it is those depths that Homer, Euripides, William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, Vasily Grossman, George Orwell, Albert Camus and Flannery O’Connor understood.

“The practice of art isn’t to make a living,” Kurt Vonnegut said. “It’s to make your soul grow.”

The historian Will Durant calculated that there have been only 29 years in all of human history during which a war was not under way somewhere. Rather than being aberrations, war and tyranny expose a side of human nature that is masked by the often unacknowledged constraints that glue society together. Our cultivated conventions and little lies of civility lull us into a refined and idealistic view of ourselves. But look at our last two decades-2 million dead in the war in Afghanistan, 1.5 million dead in the fighting in Sudan, some 800,000 butchered in the 90-day slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus by soldiers and militias directed by the Hutu government in Rwanda, a half-million dead in Angola, a quarter of a million dead in Bosnia, 200,000 dead in Guatemala, 150,000 dead in Liberia, a quarter of a million dead in Burundi, 75,000 dead in Algeria, at least 600,000 dead in Iraq and untold tens of thousands lost in the border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the fighting in Colombia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, southeastern Turkey, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, Kosovo. Civil war, brutality, ideological intolerance, conspiracy and murderous repression are the daily fare for all but the privileged few in the industrialized world.

“The gallows,” the gravediggers in “Hamlet” aptly remind us, “is built stronger than the church.”

I have little connection, however, with academics. Most professors of literature, who read the same books I read, who study the same authors, are to literature what forensic medicine is to the human body. These academics seem to spend more time sucking the life out of books than absorbing the profound truths the authors struggle to communicate. Perhaps it is because academics, sheltered in their gardens of privilege, often have hyper-developed intellects and the emotional maturity of 12-year-olds. Perhaps it is because they fear the awful revelations in front of them, truths that, deeply understood, would demand they fight back. It is easier to eviscerate the form, the style and the structure with textual analysis and ignore the passionate call for our common humanity.

“As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary,” Proust wrote. “It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place. …”

Although Shakespeare’s Jack Falstaff is a coward, a liar and a cheat, although he embodies all the scourges of human frailty Henry V rejects, I delight more in Falstaff’s address to himself in the Boar’s Head Tavern, where he at least admits to serving to his own hedonism, than I do in Henry’s heroic call to arms before Agincourt. Falstaff personifies a lust for life and the mockery of heaven and hell, of the crown and all other instruments of authority. He disdains history, honor and glory. Falstaff is a much more accurate picture of the common soldier who wants to save his own hide and finds little in the rhetoric of officers who urge him into danger. Prince Hal is a hero and defeats Percy while Falstaff pretends to be a corpse. But Falstaff embodies the basic desires we all have. He is baser than most. He lacks the essential comradeship necessary among soldiers, but he clings to life in a way a soldier under fire can sympathize with. It is to the ale houses and the taverns, not the court, that these soldiers return when the war is done. Jack Falstaff’s selfish lust for pleasure hurts few, while Henry’s selfish lust for power leaves corpses strewn across muddy battlefields. And while we have been saturated with the rhetoric of Henry V this past July 4 holiday we would be better off listening to the truth spoken by Falstaff.

There is a moment in “Henry IV, Part I,” when Falstaff leads his motley band of followers to the place where the army has assembled. Lined up behind him are cripples and beggars, all in rags, because those with influence and money, like George W. Bush, evade military service. Prince Hal looks askance at the pathetic collection before him, but Falstaff says, “Tut, tut, good enough to toss, food for powder, food for powder. They’ll fill a pit as well as better. Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.”

I have seen the pits in the torpid heat in El Salvador, the arid valleys in northern Iraq and the forested slopes in Bosnia. Falstaff is right. Despite the promises never to forget the sacrifices of the dead, of those crippled and maimed by war, the loss and suffering eventually become superfluous. The pain is relegated to the pages of dusty books, the corridors of poorly funded VA hospitals, and sustained by grieving families who still visit the headstone of a man or woman who died too young. This will be the fate of our dead and wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the fate of all those who go to war. We honor them only in the abstract. The causes that drove the nation to war, and for which they gave their lives, are soon forgotten, replaced by new ones that are equally absurd.

Stratis Myrivilis in his novel “Life in the Tomb” makes this point:

“A few years from now, I told him,” Myrvilis wrote nearly a century ago, “perhaps others would be killing each other for anti-nationalist ideals. Then they would laugh at our own killings just as we had laughed at those of the Byzantines. These others would indulge in mutual slaughter with the same enthusiasm, though their ideals were new. Warfare under the entirely fresh banners would be just as disgraceful as always. They might even rip out each other’s guts then with religious zeal, claiming that they were ‘fighting to end all fighting.’ But they too would be followed by still others who would laugh at them with the same gusto.”

Patriotic duty and the disease of nationalism lure us to deny our common humanity. Yet to pursue, in the broadest sense, what is human, what is moral, in the midst of conflict or under the heel of the totalitarian state is often a form of self-destruction. And while Shakespeare, Proust and Conrad meditate on success, they honor the nobility of failure, knowing that there is more to how a life is lived than what it achieves. Lear and Richard II gain knowledge only as they are pushed down the ladder, as they are stripped of power and the illusions which power makes possible.

Late one night, unable to sleep during the war in El Salvador, I picked up “Macbeth.” It was not a calculated decision. I had come that day from a village where about a dozen people had been murdered by the death squads, their thumbs tied behind their backs with wire and their throats slit.

I had read the play before as a student. Now it took on a new, electric force. A thirst for power at the cost of human life was no longer an abstraction. It had become part of my own experience.

I came upon Lady Macduff’s speech, made when the murderers, sent by Macbeth, arrive to kill her and her small children. “Whither should I fly?” she asks.

I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly.

Those words seized me like Furies and cried out for the dead I had seen lined up that day in a dusty market square, and the dead I would see later: the 3,000 children killed in Sarajevo, the dead in unmarked mass graves in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Sudan, Algeria, El Salvador, the dead who are my own, who carried notebooks, cameras and a vanquished idealism into war and never returned. Of course resistance is usually folly, of course power exercised with ruthlessness will win, of course force easily snuffs out gentleness, compassion and decency. In the end, all we can cling to is each other.

Thucydides, knowing that Athens was doomed in the war with Sparta, consoled himself with the belief that his city’s artistic and intellectual achievements would in the coming centuries overshadow raw Spartan militarism. Beauty and knowledge could, ultimately, triumph over power. But we may not live to see such a triumph. And on this weekend of collective exaltation I did not attend fireworks or hang a flag outside my house. I did not participate in rituals designed to hide from ourselves who we have become. I read the “Eclogues” by Virgil. These poems were written during Rome’s brutal civil war. They consoled me in their wisdom and despair. Virgil understood that the words of a poet were no match for war. He understood that the chant of the crowd urges nearly all to collective madness, and yet he wrote with the hope that there were some among his readers who might continue, even when faced with defeat, to sing his hymns of compassion.

… sed carmina tantum
nostra valent, Lycida, tela inter Martia, quantum
Chaonias dicunt aquila veniente columbas.

…but songs of ours
Avail among the War-God’s weapons, Lycidas,
As much as Chaonian doves, they say, when the
eagle comes.

* * *

Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.“

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/07/10164/

[willoweyes]

Here is the message i recieved from my
Son today, who rides a bike across the West, and writes me from Wyoming and the Rainbow Gathering:



Hey, I just Returned to Babylon after spending two weeks with the Rainbow
> Family on the Big Sandy mountain. The whole experience kinda reminded me
> of that Blaze Foley song Big Rock Candy Mountain. Thousands of tramps,
> hoboes, hippies, and homeless come together to work toward this dream and
> if we are lucky we get to glimps at pieces of it. I spent most of my time
> working for different kitchens collecting and chopping firewood, washing
> dishes, cooking, baking and I even built a really cool stone table for
> rolling pizza dough out of flat rocks that I haulled off the mountain. I
> really enjoyed the comunity aspect of it - everyone working together in
> anarchy, but the drug culture kinda annoyed me. Except for the first day
> when I dropped some L, I was stone sober. Everyone else was always
> itching for nicatine or dope and it was a depressing/sobering experience
> to see so many people hopelessly addicted to one substance or another.
> Johnny Law was camped out at the entrance and would search anybody for any
> reason, writting out felony tickets like they were just signing
> autographs. They would make tromps through the camps several times a day
> with mean expressions on their faces and itchy fingers near their
> weapons. Whenever they would go by, the musicians in a camp would start
> to play the empirial death march from star wars or something like it. The
> last day I was there the cops were chasing somebody to give him a
> majijuana ticket. They chased him into Kiddie Village where all the
> mothers and their children hang out. They opened fire on the guy with
> pepper spray paintballs and a crowd of people surround the cops to OM for
> peace. They all got blasted with pepper spray paint balls, including a
> few children. People were screaming "Open fire, open fire," but back at
> main circle where everyone was eating it sounded like "fire, fire" like as
> in a forest fire so 3,000 hippies went running up the hill with buckets
> and shovels to put out a fire and the cops, scared shitless, took off up
> the face of the mountain. I don't know what happened after that, but it
> couldn't have been good - Johnny Law doesn't like being on the run too
> much. I wasn't there to experience it because I had been asleep for the
> past three days and nights from a violent illness. I don't know what it
> was from - possible explainations are that 1.) the millions of mosquitoes
> carried disease from one dirty hippie to the next until it hit me 2.) the
> cooks - almost all of which had the dirties, grimiest hands I had ever
> seen 3) The water I had been drinking out of the stream. When I put these
> ideas to a shaman, he negated them all saying that I had lived in Babylon
> for too long and that was the source of my sickenss. Either way, I slept
> from the 1st through the 3rd and dreamed almost exclusively about riding
> my bike. On the night of the 3rd I dreamed I was escaping from the cops
> with two hippie miscreants that I met at the gathering when I was stopped
> by Gordon Rutlage. With a thunderous voice he spoke to me in spanish
> saying that it was good to separate. When the spirits speak, I listen, so
> the next day I left the gathering even though I was still ill. I made it
> about 10 miles before I passed out in a cow pasture with a lot of strange
> looks from it's inhabitants. The scar on my neck was throbbing from when
> I got the strangles in Coasta Rica, but I was feeling well enough to inch
> my way to town on the 5th. I was expecting some sort of Rip-Van-Winkle
> effect from all my sleep; gas prices were sure to have risen to 15 dollars
> a gallon, but alas... I slept in the park and in the morning I was
> sitting on a bench writting in my jounal when a Juggernaut steered into my
> line of sight with a huge wooden bust of Athena at the fore. I hailed and
> the driver, almost as massive as his ship, aknowledged and made his way
> toward me. He is a 250 lb Mongolian riding a Surly with more shit on it
> than I could have imagined. One of his first questions for me, after I
> had invited him to join me for some fruit, was "do you need another tube?
> I have 7 extra." The absurdity only continued from there until I had to
> ask him to join me on the road. He excepted and is now a member for team
> Macha. The three of us use our rainbow aliases - I am Rojo, He is Wojo,
> and my bike, Liath Macha or The grey. I am not sure whether or not his
> bike is animate, so there could be four of us making this journey. He
> might even go up to missoula with me to join up with the two other
> members - Baby Sam and his bike which is currently being saudered
> together to become something like a recumbant mech warrior transformer.
> Anyway, I have returned to the grace of the good spirits and am currently
> in good health, my stomach filled with fruit, in beautiful country beside
> the Tetons, in a comfrotable library in the nice mountain town of Jackson
> Wyoming and I have a companion with every possible gizmo imaginable so all
> is well. My cell phone isn't working, but maybe I can get that fixed
> tomarrow. I love you all and hope to hear back with the good word from
> Texas or wherever the road may have taken you,
> Jakey
>

[suebee]

sidey, willow, you made my day!

[suebee]

is anyone else the slightest bit bothered over this FISA immunity for just the 30 wiretapping felonies committed by the :evil: gov. bush ?

[sidecross]

‘The sound of one hand clapping’
can just as easily turn to the
sound of a roaring howl.

[sidecross]

"...It may be my bias, or my imagination, or my distaste for toil, but from here America looks like one big workhouse, "under God, indivisible, with time off to shit, shower and shop." A country whose citizens have been reduced to "human assets" of a vast and relentless economic machine, moving human parts oiled by commodities and kept in motion by the edict, "produce or die." Where employment and a job dominates all other aspects of life, and the loss of which spells the loss of everything..."




Our Produce-or-Die Culture Is Killing Us -- And We're Idiotically Grinning and Bearing It

By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com. Posted November 3, 2009.

Every afternoon when I knock off from writing, after I suck down a Modelo beer and take an hour nap, I step out onto the 400-year-old cobbled street, with its hap-scatter string of vendors lining both sides. All sorts of vendors -- vegetable vendors, vendors of tacos, chicharrones, chenille bedspreads and plucked chickens, cigarros, soft drinks, sopa and suet. Merchants whose business address consists of a card table in front of their casita.

Here in this working class neighborhood on Calle Zaragoza, tourists seldom venture, and the neighborhood merchants' customers are their neighbors. Their goods are the common fare of daily family life in Mexico. Today, at a table less than two blocks away, I purchased a dozen brown eggs, with the idea of making huevos rancheros. The purchase took three quarters of an hour, and included stumbling but cheerful half English/half Spanish conversations with the six vendors between my casita and the table of Gabriel, the old egg and cheese vendor with an artificial leg and wizened smile who assures me that rooster-fertilized eggs make a man go all night. "I am too old to care about that," I half speak, half gesture in that rudimentary sign language understood everywhere. "Hawwww" he chortles and says something in Spanish I cannot understand. An English speaking bystander, a teenager with a backward baseball cap and dressed in "L.A. sag," translates: "He says his pendejo is as hard as his plastic leg. You still alive! You never too old!"

These vendors are not poor people or peasants. They own homes, drive cars, watch cable television, send their children to college and do most of the things North Americans do. But their jobs are their livelihoods, not their lives, and every transaction is permeated with the ebb and flow of daily neighborhood and family life. "Is Maria going to graduate after all? Si! But by just by the hair in her nose! Who is going to sell fireworks for the Feast of Saint Andrew?" (Saint Andrew is the patron saint of Ajijic.)

Behind the plastered brick walls along the street mechanics fix cars, dentists pull teeth and teachers cheer preschoolers onward in a chirping Spanish rendition of Eensy Weensy Spider. The entire street is busily, but not hectically, engaged in making a living, most of the people doing so within 50 feet of where they will sleep tonight. But before they sleep they will sit out on the street, or perhaps the tiny neighborhood plaza, gossiping with the same neighbors who've been their customers all day. The same families into which their children will marry and whose sick elders they will burn candles for in the ancient stone church, founded as a Spanish colonial mission to civilize the Huichol Indians who've since retreated up into the mountains to honor their "god of the opening clouds" in peyote rituals.

Obviously work and commerce have their problems here, just as anywhere else. The peso rises and falls. Cheap Chinese imports crowd out domestic goods. People work hard, especially tradesmen and laborers, but there is a complete lack of obsession and stress that characterizes North American jobs. Which, of course, many Canadians and Americans retired to Ajijic take for laziness.

It may be my bias, or my imagination, or my distaste for toil, but from here America looks like one big workhouse, "under God, indivisible, with time off to shit, shower and shop." A country whose citizens have been reduced to "human assets" of a vast and relentless economic machine, moving human parts oiled by commodities and kept in motion by the edict, "produce or die." Where employment and a job dominates all other aspects of life, and the loss of which spells the loss of everything.

Yeah, yeah, I know, them ain't jobs -- in America we don't have jobs, we have careers. I've read the national script, and am quite aware that all those human assets writing computer code and advertising copy, or staring at screen monitors in the "human services" industry are "performing meaningful and important work in a positive workplace environment." Performing? Is this brain surgery? Or a stage act? If we are performing, then for whom? Exactly who is watching?

Proof abounds of the unending joy and importance of work and production in our wealth-based economy. Just read the job recruitment ads. Or ask any of the people clinging fearfully by their fingernails to those four remaining jobs in America. But is a job -- hopefully a good one -- and workplace strivance really everything? Most of us would say, "Well of course not." But in a nation that now sends police to break up the tent camps and car camps of homeless unemployed citizens who once belonged to the middle class, it might well be everything.

In one of those divine moments of synchronicity writers pray for, I just saw reinforcement of the above. Checking my email web browser, one of those annoying ads masquerading as advice, popped up. It reads: "Doing good work is no longer enough! Ten tips to keep from being laid off your job." Shown is a cheerful young woman at a desk, feeling deliriously safe about her job, judging from her hysterical bug-eyed smile, thanks to "These Ten Tips!" from a commercial jobs agency. When personal employment fears, job terror and insecurity, can be captured and turned into a job for someone else, there's not much room left for the general spirit of commonality, or a sense of a shared commons (such as this Mexican street) of the nation's work-life. Not when any of us could become indigent at a moment's notice.

But you won't hear anyone complaining. America doesn't like whiners. A whiner or a cynic is about the worst thing you can be in the land of gunpoint optimism. Foreigners often remark on the upbeat American personality. I assure them that our American corpocracy has its ways of pistol whipping or sedating its human assets into the appropriate level of cheeriness.

Appearing cheerful is vital in a society where all of life is monitored by an employer, a credit rating bureau or the media's projection of the world, and mediated by the financialization of life's every aspect. Every action and movement is a transaction, some as large as the mortgage, others as small as the purchase of a bus token, or the cost of a cell phone call, gasoline, vehicle maintenance and parking costs for movement within the sprawling asphalt grids we call communities. Even respite from work with its vacation "leisure destinations" put on the credit card, and even the greatest commons of all, nature, has a cost of access, whether it be admission to national parks or the cost of camping and other "recreational equipment."

In the background a tabulator relentlessly calculates our bill for the thoroughly transactional and mediated life. Quit paying the bills and you are disappeared. Erased from the screens of a society of watchers watching each other -- or watching celebrities, those godlike creatures dwelling on the Olympus of the most watched ... and dreaming of perhaps being watched on Oprah by even more watchers than already watch us for some fleeting few seconds.

There is a flickering screen or monitor in front of and between every citizen of the mediated society of watchers. Whether we watch television or other media matters not, we dwell among the watchers in a surveillance society of our peers. We dress appropriately, speak middle class English, not urban street slang or redneck, and look as prosperous as possible, or as hip as possible, or as learned or pious or whatever within our peer groups, and for outsider groups. No jokers, smokers or midnight tokers allowed in Mainstream American society and culture, which consists of working, consuming and "appearing to be," but never purely being.

We flow willingly through the transactional circuitry of the wealth economy like ghosts, optimistic and eerily cheerful, encountering one another through the hierarchical commodity affinity groups we call our peers, people who consume the same things we do, and have the same purchased identity and "lifestyle" we do. Swimmers in a sea of mass produced goods and mass produced identities through consumption of those goods, we strive for uniqueness, but not very hard, lest we lose the commodities we've acquired.
This is stamped deep within our American being by the greater forces of commodity capitalism; we seem to carry it with us wherever we go. We want to experience uniqueness. Thus Americans and Canadians complain that there are now "too many gringos" in Ajijic," implying that they are different than the rest of their own kind.

But the truth is that we are all very commonly issued products of a profit driven workhouse where no human commons is allowable, lest the workers find meaning and joy in each other as human beings, and perhaps become less work driven, less productive and less profitable. Best that their lives remain mediated, disembodied from the great commons of the human spirit, unmoored from the great natural commons binding all living things called Earth --

images of which will be provided for your delight on The Nature Channel at 9 PM tonight.
Until then, stay cheerful.
Pay your bills on time.
Good night!

Meanwhile, night is falling in Ajijic. Next door a child protests his nightly bath. A Chihuahua yips in the casita across the courtyard, the flickering blue light of a television shatters like harmless lightning on the face of a very large old woman fallen asleep in an armchair beneath a hanging tapestry of Christ feeding his lambs.

Which reminds me. Tomorrow morning I must make those huevos rancheros.


Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), about working class America. A complete archive of his on-line work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his website.


http://www.alternet.org/politics/143684/our_produce-or-die_culture_is_killing_us_--_and_we%27re_idiotically_grinning_and_bearing_it?p age=entire

[suebee]

omg sidey, new american poetry: sh-- shower and shop! excellent posting, as usual....:D

i loved my bartender jobs of ten years' enforced duration: leisure exchanges, talking people up, down, into some ideas out of others - a true groundhog day experience i gained so much from. would that we ('u.s. americans, such as') could use this current "economic" tear in the fabric of our familiar routine to gain some appreciation for the miracle of breathing, and beget something beneficial from it.

[willoweyes]

:)
CIA Torterers
Asses Kicked!

First paragraph excerpt from the Nov. 2, 2009 New Yorker--which the whole issue is hilarious BTW, but in inadvertently. . . .

"In 2008, half the people who watched Fox News were over 63, and most who watched the more strident shows [such a cautious word!] were men. All that chesty fulminating apparently functions as political Cialis. Fox News shows should probably carry a warning: Contact your doctor if you have rage lasting more than four hours . . . ."

Yay, ALL YOU right thinking folks who aren't traitors! Some "gutsy" Italian judge sentenced CIA men in absentina*FOR THEIR PART IN THE ABDUCTION (whoops) and torture of somebody whom I think is named Abu Emar.

We can all breathe easier thanks to the brave Italian judge.

*btw, my spellcheck insisted I probably meant "Argentina" here. . . . My friends DON'T LISTEN TO MACHINES!

[willoweyes]

BTW Ms. Bee--your sh--, shower and shop post-- Thanks.

and thank you Sidecross--thank you both for bringing to our eyes something we are enriched for seeing.

[suebee]

overflow of h1n1 shots available to fed reserve and goldman employees, but not nearly enough for vulnerable citizens.... maybe the makers of the vaccinations misunderstood what the word swine referred to when they forwarded so many shots to the fed and goldman?

[willoweyes]

oh god priceless Ms. Bee! I laughed out loud and sent it to my daughter (who is a schoolteacher and who has been recently sickened by the flu).

[suebee]

now, eight hours after the mass murderer is dead, hes a-live. :rolleyes: hmmm. how unusual, the military lies.

[willoweyes]

Apparently the shooter had recently given a speech at a medical conference advocating the death of infidels.

meantime our e-mails and library records are being scrutinized for a whiff of dissent.

[Isaiah Mpski]

In my medical school class at UTMB-Galveston,and of which I was President for three years there were 150 students.Out of that 150,10 went into the "field" of psychiatry.Of those ten probably three fourths were the "nuts",oddballs,you know like the two guys who sat in the back of the lecture room holding hands.Both became psychiatrists.:hmm:
At graduation,once walks across the stage and receives his or her diploma,they immediately become gods.The ones who became psychiatrists suddenly think the reason they had "problems" during their "maturation" were not caused because of any flaws in their own personalities or lives but in actuality the fault of those with whom they had problems.
Evenually the problems continue but by that time the "psychiatrists" are the ones with the "power"(a gun )for example,and their rage and feeling of futility in life comes out.:errf:
I am deeply disturbed and depressed by what happened in Texas yesterday.
Don't get me wrong.There are some very intelligent and caring people who are psychiatrists but if you have to deal with one and your initial reaction is "there's something not quite right about that person" you would be best served by quickly walking away and cutting ties with that person.;)

[Isaiah Mpski]

Actually I think the reason Dr Han son psychoed out was his addiction to Westerns,that is,the movie type Westerns and maybe a few Clint Eastwood movies thrown in for good cause. :D
Not that what he did was right.Maybe we are all ruled by the most basic of emotions.Fate and Love of Juan's Lord.
"Sex said Freud why he was 'analysing " his wife and her sister,was what it is all about.It think.
I think Jung talks more and farther(sp) into what Freud was trying to say than anyone,yours included.
I think it's above sex Willow but it's all about sex Willow-the anima-eat or be eaten.:rolleyes:

Old pond,new frog.
New Pond,old Frog.
Splash!

or something like that.:eek:

[Isaiah Mpski]

America is truly a Democratic state.
The citizens get what they want.
Good and hard or soft and bad.

We need to keep a better watch on our half of the world.
Why wasn't Hansan kicked out of the Military prior to yesterday?

[Isaiah Mpski]

Willow,be not dismayed.
I saw two flocks of Robins yesterday,several hundred birds headin your way.
I too was worried about the BJays last year until I saw a flock of several hundred.
I think they know there's different plagues and climate warming-they don't sweat through those feathers- and are simply displaying "their " response to Global Waming.;)

[suebee]

Why wasn't Hansan kicked out of the Military prior to yesterday?

or simply allowed to leave. i heard hasan offered to pay the military for his med education and even got an attorney involved since he obviously wasnt happy being harrassed by gods christian soldiers, and wasnt processing the horrific injuries he was seeing daily at walter reed, and the thought of killing muslims was making him nuts....all of this on the record, hell-o. if he just pretended to be gay he could have left in a day.

im sorry but this country is stupid beyond measure.

[sidecross]

Watch Bill Moyer's Journal 11/6/09 'The Good Soldier'

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html

[Isaiah Mpski]

..yeah and Goggle Isaiah Mpski.
Is that 11,000 hits on me or BOTH.:rolleyes:

[sidecross]

Addicted to Nonsense

Published on Monday, November 30, 2009 by TruthDig.com

by Chris Hedges

Will Tiger Woods finally talk to the police? Who will replace Oprah? (Not that Oprah can ever be replaced, of course.) And will Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple who crashed President Barack Obama's first state dinner, command the hundreds of thousands of dollars they want for an exclusive television interview? Can Levi Johnston, father of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's grandson, get his wish to be a contestant on "Dancing With the Stars"?

The chatter that passes for news, the gossip that is peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity. We stand on the cusp of one of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations in human history, one that is radically reconfiguring our economy as it is the environment, and our obsessions revolve around the trivial and the absurd.

What really matters in our lives-the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the steady deterioration of the dollar, the mounting foreclosures, the climbing unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps and the awful reality that once the billions in stimulus money run out next year we will be bereft and broke-doesn't fit into the cheerful happy talk that we mainline into our brains. We are enraptured by the revels of a dying civilization. Once reality shatters the airy edifice, we will scream and yell like petulant children to be rescued, saved and restored to comfort and complacency. There will be no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial projects and discover a new simplicity, as well as a new humility, or we will stumble blindly toward catastrophe and neofeudalism.

Celebrity worship has banished the real from public discourse. And the adulation of celebrity is pervasive. The frenzy around political messiahs, or the devotion of millions of viewers to Oprah, is all part of the yearning to see ourselves in those we worship. We seek to be like them. We seek to make them like us. If Jesus and "The Purpose Driven Life" won't make us a celebrity, then Tony Robbins or positive psychologists or reality television will. We are waiting for our cue to walk onstage and be admired and envied, to become known and celebrated. Nothing else in life counts.

We yearn to stand before the camera, to be noticed and admired. We build pages on social networking sites devoted to presenting our image to the world. We seek to control how others think of us. We define our worth solely by our visibility. We live in a world where not to be seen, in some sense, is to not exist. We pay lifestyle advisers to help us look and feel like celebrities, to build around us the set for the movie of our own life. Martha Stewart constructed her financial empire, when she wasn't engaged in insider trading, telling women how to create a set design for the perfect home. The realities within the home, the actual family relationships, are never addressed. Appearances make everything whole. Plastic surgeons, fitness gurus, diet doctors, therapists, life coaches, interior designers and fashion consultants all, in essence, promise to make us happy, to make us celebrities. And happiness comes, we are assured, with how we look, with the acquisition of wealth and power, or at least the appearance of it. Glossy magazines like Town & Country cater to the absurd pretensions of the very rich to be celebrities. They are photographed in expensive designer clothing inside the lavishly decorated set pieces that are their homes. The route to happiness is bound up in how skillfully we present ourselves to the world. We not only have to conform to the dictates of this manufactured vision, but we also have to project an unrelenting optimism and happiness. Hedonism and wealth are openly worshiped on Wall Street as well as on shows such as "The Hills," "Gossip Girl," "Sex and the City," "My Super Sweet 16" and "The Real Housewives of (whatever bourgeois burg happens to be in vogue)."

The American oligarchy-1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined-are the characters we most envy and watch on television. They live and play in multimillion-dollar mansions. They marry models or professional athletes. They are chauffeured in stretch limos. They rush from fashion shows to movie premieres to fabulous resorts. They have surgically enhanced, perfect bodies and are draped in designer clothes that cost more than some people make in a year. This glittering life is held before us like a beacon. This life, we are told, is the most desirable, the most gratifying. And this is the life we want. Greed is good, we believe, because one day through our acquisitions we will become the elite. So let the rest of the bastards suffer.

The working class, comprising tens of millions of struggling Americans, are locked out of television's gated community. They are mocked, even as they are tantalized, by the lives of excess they watch on the screen in their living rooms. Almost none of us will ever attain these lives of wealth and power. Yet we are told that if we want it badly enough, if we believe sufficiently in ourselves, we too can have everything. We are left, when we cannot adopt these impossible lifestyles as our own, with feelings of inferiority and worthlessness. We have failed where others have succeeded.

We consume these countless lies daily. We believe the false promises that if we spend more money, if we buy this brand or that product, if we vote for this candidate, we will be respected, envied, powerful, loved and protected. The flamboyant lives of celebrities and the outrageous characters on television, movies, professional wrestling and sensational talk shows are peddled to us, promising to fill up the emptiness in our own lives. Celebrity culture encourages everyone to think of themselves as potential celebrities, as possessing unique if unacknowledged gifts. Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity. The New Age mysticism and pop psychology of television personalities and evangelical pastors, along with the array of self-help best-sellers penned by motivational speakers, psychiatrists and business tycoons, peddle this fantasy. Reality is condemned in these popular belief systems as the work of Satan, as defeatist, as negativity or as inhibiting our inner essence and power. Those who question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those who are able to confront reality, along with those who grasp the hollowness and danger of celebrity culture, are condemned for their pessimism or intellectualism.

The illusionists who shape our culture, and who profit from our incredulity, hold up the gilded cult of Us. Popular expressions of religious belief, personal empowerment, corporatism, political participation and self-definition argue that all of us are special, entitled and unique. All of us, by tapping into our inner reserves of personal will and undiscovered talent, by visualizing what we want, can achieve, and deserve to achieve, happiness, fame and success. This relentless message cuts across ideological lines. This mantra has seeped into every aspect of our lives. We are all entitled to everything. And because of this self-absorption, and deep self-delusion, we have become a country of child-like adults who speak and think in the inane gibberish of popular culture.

Celebrities who come from humble backgrounds are held up as proof that anyone can be adored by the world. These celebrities, like saints, are examples that the impossible is always possible. Our fantasies of belonging, of fame, of success and of fulfillment are projected onto celebrities. These fantasies are stoked by the legions of those who amplify the culture of illusion, who persuade us that the shadows are real. The juxtaposition of the impossible illusions inspired by celebrity culture and our "insignificant" individual achievements, however, is leading to an explosive frustration, anger, insecurity and invalidation. It is fostering a self-perpetuating cycle that drives the frustrated, alienated individual with even greater desperation and hunger away from reality, back toward the empty promises of those who seduce us, who tell us what we want to hear. The worse things get, the more we beg for fantasy. We ingest these lies until our faith and our money run out. And when we fall into despair we medicate ourselves, as if the happiness we have failed to find in the hollow game is our deficiency. And, of course, we are told it is.

I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian right called "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." I visited former manufacturing towns where for many the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. Many have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged the working class into profound personal and economic despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian right who offer a belief in magic, miracles and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation. Unless we rapidly re-enfranchise these dispossessed workers, insert them back into the economy, unless we give them hope, these demagogues will rise up to take power. Time is running out. The poor can dine out only so long on illusions. Once they grasp that they have been betrayed, once they match the bleak reality of their future with the fantasies they are fed, once their homes are foreclosed and they realize that the jobs they lost are never coming back, they will react with a fury and vengeance that will snuff out the remains of our anemic democracy and usher in a new dark age.

© 2009 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/30-7

[suebee]

i'd seriously HATE to be chris hedges. i already know enough to puke, imagine being him and knowing more? :cry:

courage, and hope. well, courage at least.

[Isaiah Mpski]

What the guy is talking about is Idolatry.
We drive that deep and early into our social structure.;)

Courage.You're going to need some courage when the ground starts shaking under your feet and all hell breaks loose out there in commie land.:o

I am so mad at you and Willow not responding to me(and Nanouk-although I know she's out there watching) I could just hold my breath and cry.:errf:

[sidecross]

The Global War on Stealth Underwear

By Robert Scheer, Truthdig

Posted on December 31, 2009

There is no "war" against terrorism. What George W. Bush launched and Barack Obama insists on perpetuating does not qualify. Not if by war one means doing the obvious and checking a highly suspicious air traveler's underwear to see if explosives have been sewn in. If Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had put the stuff in his shoes we would have had him because that was tried before, but our government was too preoccupied with fighting unnecessary conventional wars and developing anti-missile defense systems to anticipate such a primitive delivery system.

The explosives-laden underwear--worn by an airline passenger who had previously been flagged as a potentially dangerous fanatic, and who had paid cash for his ticket and had no checked luggage--was the terrorist's weapon of choice, one that could have blown a hole in the side of Northwest Airlines' Detroit-bound Flight 253 on Christmas Day, killing hundreds of innocents. But it is not a weapon to be effectively countered with the deployment of hundreds of thousands of American combat troops. Nor can it be stopped by the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of planes, subs and missiles in our arsenal of Cold War-era weapons, part of an annual defense budget that is higher in inflation-adjusted dollars than at any time in the past half-century.

In response to the 9/11 hijackers, armed with artillery that cost a couple hundred dollars at most, we threw money and, more important, attention at conventional military responses while neglecting the difficult police work and the intelligence evaluation and civilian-focused technology necessary to thwart homeland attacks. Yes, there are evildoers out there that mean us harm, as President Bush declaimed. But they are often the products of the best of Western education who, as examples ranging from the lead 9/11 hijackers--the Hamburg group--to the elite University College London-educated engineer in the latest incident demonstrate, move more easily in urbane Western societies than in Afghan villages.

The technology that could help detect a sophisticated plane hijacker or suicide bomber has been largely botched in development and only halfheartedly deployed even when it is available. On Tuesday, a devastating report in The Washington Post revealed that the full-body scanning equipment hyped after 9/11, which might have detected the explosives involved in last week's incident, is still not in wide use. As the Post stated, "A plan that would have helped focus the development of better screening technology and procedures--including a risk-based assessment of aviation threats--is almost two years overdue, according to a report this fall by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress."

So, screening equipment that can detect plastic explosives exists, but it was not used in this case and, as the GAO predicted, "TSA cannot ensure that it is targeting the highest priority security needs at checkpoints; measure the extent to which deployed technologies reduce the risk of terrorist attacks; or make needed adjustments to its PSP [Passenger Screening Program] strategy." As a result, the GAO concluded: "TSA lacks assurance that its investments in screening technologies address the highest priority security needs at airport passenger checkpoints."

The "systematic failure" in the nation's security that President Obama referred to Tuesday derives from the war metaphor itself and from the assumption, begun with Bush's irrational invasion of Iraq and extended with Obama's escalation in Afghanistan, that terrorism is a military rather than a criminal threat. The terrorists are not rebel fighters rooted, as are the Taliban and the remnants of the Iraq insurgency, in their homeland struggles and subject to being defeated on conventional battlefields.

Rather, they are rootless cosmopolitans of violence, alienated from any stated homeland and free to move easily about the world, armed in almost every instance with valid passports, visas and money to exploit our inability to seriously evaluate our own intelligence data. They can count on our top government officials ignoring blinking red warnings, as the Bush White House did before 9/11, or the alarm of a well-connected and properly concerned Nigerian banker-father.

Preventing terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland has nothing to do with occupying vast tracts of land or winning the hearts and minds of backward villagers whom we falsely depict as surrogates of an evil empire, as we did in Vietnam and are now doing in Afghanistan. What is needed is smart police work to catch these highly mobile fanatics, and that begins with actually reading and then acting on the readily available intelligence data. It requires detectives with brains and not generals with firepower.

The ballooning of the defense budget after 9/11 has proved a great boondoggle for the military-industrial complex, which suddenly found an excuse to build weapons and deploy conventional forces against a superpower enemy that no longer exists. But our stealth fighters and bombers designed to defeat Soviet defenses that were never built are a poor match against a terrorist's stealth underwear.


Robert Scheer is Editor in Chief of Truthdig, where he publishes a weekly column, and author of a new book, The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/144880/the_global_war_on_stealth_underwear

[Isaiah Mpski]

Sign me up.
And Happy New Year,
James Monroe.

[suebee]

50 trillion dollars is the total of usa's net worth over the past 240 years. we just spent 6% of that total in iraq. its like wiping out new england as ed schultz said today on his radio show.

and bush walks around a free man. at least he keeps his mouth shut.

[willoweyes]

great article on our blind lurching tumble into the slough sidecross, and I somehow missed the 11-30 article by Chris Hedges re the bread and circuses. . . . what is there to say? great writing and thinking, ignored, ignored. sad songs will be sung of our age.

[Isaiah Mpski]

Yeah.That's easy for you to say as you're son-bathing in Santa Fe.
I'm starting to get chapped off about what's happening to me outside of the courtroom.
It is a time of synchronicity Willow and SB and maybe CM.
It's time for creativity and for me an era of writing and painting again.
Juan like unto Moses