TRINITY TRIPTYCH. Art Liberation Project, c. JLegry 2012a

A monk-warrior in the Kingdom of Heaven says:

“By the word ‘religion,’ I’ve seen the lunacy of fanatics of every denomination be called the will of god. I’ve seen too much religion in the eyes of too many murderers. Holiness is in right action and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves, and goodness. What god desires is your head and your heart, by what you decide every day, you will be a good man [or woman], or not.”

There are those who will say that if there is not a personified God, humankind will perish. However, God (if present) is universal and not capable of personification, denomination, or ritualization. God is the human concept of a Perfect Platonic Being: One and all, hen kai pan. God is life, not dogma. God is curiosity and learning, not brainwashing and stagnation. God is an ideal, an example for emulation, an aspiration, a romance, an invitation to speculation, not a non-profit corporation, theme park, or big black carpet-draped rock.  Émile Zola wrote, “Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.”

There are at least three major institutions on earth that have outlived their usefulness and become baldly destructive and should be done away with: corporations, armies and religions. “Armies” will unnerve some, but think of it, without corporations and religions most of the causes of war will evaporate. Plus, wholesale murder is no longer profitable (if it ever was, beyond the obscene success of a very few greedy people) and generally accomplishes nothing (e.g. 50 years after the Korean War the peninsula is still militarized, divided and unstable). The emerging moral is that we should grow up, stop fighting like schoolyard bullies over whose dog is prettiest and who gets all the marbles, and begin to cooperate with one another for the purpose of sharing this shrinking world and its dwindling resources without turning into maddened overcrowded cannibalistic rats in a global-sized cage.

We Move to Amend.We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

• Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
• Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count.
• Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate “preemption” actions by global, national, and state governments.

Signed by 285,121 and counting . . . CONTACT: http://www.movetoamend.org/

Excerpt: ALL OF A KEY, an unpublished novel:  (Scene: Seniors Alice  and Lou and Twenty-something Charlie tour Cairo Museum)

The ground floor entrance of Cairo Museum was dominated by a statue of Queen Tiye seated beside her husband, Amenhotep III, in a huge composition seven meters high and five meters wide.

“For the first time in Egyptian history,” Alice said, “the queen is shown the same size as the king.  She was a commoner.  Her father, Yuya, was her husband’s chief vizier, as he had been for his father, Tuthmosis IV.  We’re going to see Yuya today.”

“He would be important, why?” Lou asked, fumbling with his folding map guide to the exhibit halls.

“The Exodus may have occurred at several different times and places, and a great deal of money and faith has been expended to ‘prove’ each of them.  Each has its merits and advocates, each its flaws and detractors.  What is incontrovertible is that a Semitic tribe co-mingled with the Egyptian pharaonic family, fell afoul of orthodox Egyptian authorities, left or fled Egypt, looting as much of the place as possible as they went, setting up a religious opposition and a separate organization that not only challenged Egyptian traditions, but declared a ‘special,’ ‘separate,’ and ‘supreme,’ relationship and claim to the only true god.”

“God,” Lou agreed.

“Inventing different versions of the same truth, denying common roots, and claiming sovereignty over the myth has been criminally disruptive.  Akhenaten and his Habiru-Shasu shepherd henchmen were power-obsessed manipulators, breaking the peace and harmony of the world for personal gain.”

“Selfish bastards,” Lou agreed.  “Let me get this straight, you’re talkin’ about Joseph and Moses and those guys, right?”

“I’m talking about a particularly garbled tract of proto-history, beginning with the Story of Joseph in what is referred to as the first book of the Old Testament in the compendium called collectively the Holy Bible.”

“Oh,” Lou said.

“Scholars agree,” Alice continued, “that the Joseph Story was an original narration put down in writing in the 9^th Century B.C. and is thought to be the Judah-Israel version.  A second story came a century later, the Reuben-Jacob version.  The story in Genesis is mainly from the two sources, however, priests returning from the Babylonian exile arranged the sources, and added details: Joseph’s age (30) at time of Pharaoh’s elevation, the number of the tribe of Israel that went down into Egypt (70), the length of the sojourn (430 years), and Joseph’s request to be buried in Canaan.  Then, an editor, sometime before the second century B.C. took on the task of making one story from the three sources, and added the section on Joseph’s death and his request to be reburied in Canaan on his own initiative, or orders.”

Lou looked at her blankly.

“People believe a cobbled, fiddled myth,” she said.  “We must go to its roots to see the truth, which should prevail.  However, our self-deception and self-aggrandizement overpower facts with inventions suiting our basest desires for certainty and dominance.”

“Yeah, but so what?” Lou disagreed.  “Guy got lucky, huh?”

Charlie laughed.

“Okay, Alice,” Lou said, “men wrote the Talmud and the Bible…”

“…and the Koran,” she said.

“…and the Koran, but refute this: they also made the mistakes – not God.  God had to use several men until we correctly reconstructed what happened.”

“With another man to pronounce the trail ended.  Neatly bent,” she complimented.  “First rate religious counterpoint to reason.  That’s just the trouble, isn’t it?  Religious people see what they’ve taught themselves to believe and deny any exception on the grounds of deviltry and perdition.

“Muhammad is the descendent of another of Abraham’s sons,” Alice continued.  “Ishmael out of Hagar, Sarah (Sarai’s) Egyptian maid.  Muhammad was born in Mecca in A.D. 570, eighteen centuries after Exodus.  He started his mission at age 40 or so, preaching to Arab idolaters the ‘true faith’: Islam, the monotheistic Hanif religion of his remote ancestor Abraham.  Hanif is the Islamic word for someone who believes in one God, but is not a Jew, a Christian, or a worshipper of idols.

“Significantly,” Alice said, “the Koran agrees with the Judah-Israel and Reuben-Jacob versions of the story, but ends there, making no connection to the later priestly and editor’s additions.  This reinforces the conviction that the original story is in the first two sources, before it was given shape, or included Joseph’s reburial in Canaan.  It helps convince me that he never left Egypt.”

“So, where’d he go?” Lou scoffed.

“He’s in Room Number 12 according to the floor map,” she replied.  “I like what I understand of the ancient Egyptian concept of our relation to god.  God created all out of thought and word.  Everything is part of god.  The million gods are one; all creation, everything, is part of the whole.  Hence, the world went out of balance when the Akhenaten-Moses megalomaniac took his god out of Egypt and set him up separate above everything else in the world.  It would be good for all of us, if we recognized and nourished the roots instead of losing ourselves in the branches.  Of course, anything is possible, Lou, but let’s have a look at this particular mummy.  I really believe it’s  your Joseph.”

Yuya had a long thin dignified face, almost alive, wearing a calm confident expression.  The position of his hands was striking.  They were normally placed over the chest in the Osirian position, but here, in the only example Alice had ever seen, the palms were down just under the chin, as if giving reverence, not to the gods, but to himself.

Unusually, his ears were unpierced.  His strong, aquiline features and hooked nose immediately suggested foreign, possibly Semitic origin.  His white hair and aged appearance indicated that he was at least sixty years old when he died.

“Commanding figure,” Lou admitted.  “Lot of character in that face: full, strong lips, prominent determined jaw.  He could wake right up.  Wow!  What an embalming job.”

“He’s the originator of the great religious movement that his daughter and grandson carried into execution.”

“Come on, he could be Syrian, or anything.  You don’t know he’s Moses.”

“He is Yuya, father of Tiye, whom Amenhotep III made his Great Royal Wife. Their son, Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) married his cousin, Nefertiti, Yuya’s grand daughter by his son Aye.  Akhenaten closed the temples, banned the ancient gods of Egypt, and established a monotheistic God, like the God of Israel, with himself as high priest.  I believe he can be linked to Moses, or rather to the mythological stereotype we know as ‘Moses.’”

Looking at the well-preserved features, Lou thought that Yuya did have the face of an ecclesiastic; there was something around the mouth.

“I have in my files at home,” Alice said, “a photocopy of Yuya’s titles, taken from the book written in 1907 by Theodore M. Davis.  One of them was it ntr n nb tawi, “the holy father of the Lord of the Two Lands”, and not just the common semi-priestly it ntr, “the father of the god”.  That certainly sounds like a blood relation, doesn’t it?  If we’re ever to get the truth, this is a good reason for re-examination.”

“To what end, Alice?” Charlie asked.

“All three religions revere Joseph,” she replied.  “If this is he…”

“They’ll kill each other to get him,” Charlie said.  “Best to let the poor beggar lie.  If that’s your Joseph, or anyone else’s, he didn’t get to Canaan, but he looks content.  Let’s not trouble his rest.”

Lou laughed and nodded.  Alice took a few notes and made a sketch from which she would later do an ink painting.  Yuya’s profile was particularly interesting, she thought.  He’s not Syrian.

Yuya, “Holy Father of the Lord of the Two Lands”

PARTIAL SOURCES:

Moses the Egyptian, Jan Assmann, the memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism.  Harvard University Press. The author is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg. A brilliant study by a world-renowned specialist.

Hebrew Pharaohs of Egypt, Ahmed Osman, the secret lineage of the Patriarch Joseph.  Bear & Company.  Cairo-born author presents results of twenty-two years writing and research.

BEYOND DAN BROWN: The DeVinci Load. 

The so-called Holy Grail is the object of legendary quest for Arthurian knights and may be a “wide-mouthed or shallow vessel,” although its precise etymology (in the true literal sense of the word) remains uncertain, and small wonder.

The Grail was probably inspired by classical or Celtic mythologies, which abound in horns of plenty, magic life-restoring caldrons, and the like.  In Finland, the pre-Christian Kalevala features the sampo, which might be a pillar that holds up the sky, or a mill to produce salt, meal and gold, or a talisman of happiness and prosperity.  Take your pick.

The first extant text (or more aptly invention) about the Grail is Chrétien de Troyes’ late 12th century unfinished romance Parceval or Le Conte du Graal, which combined the religious with the fantastic.  In the 13th century Robert de Borron’s poem extended the Christian significance of the legend, linking the Grail with Christ’s cup at the Last Supper and with Joseph of Aramea whom he said used it to catch Jesus’ blood as he hung on the cross.  In the same century, Wolfram von Esenbach’s Parzival gave the Grail profound and mystical expression as a precious stone fallen from Heaven (sampo, anyone?).  Malory’s late 15th century Le Morte D’Arthur transmitted the fanciful Grail essence to English-speaking readers.

In the story-telling invention, the quest itself became a search for mystical union with God.  Through various permutations by many different writers over several hundreds of years, the Grail theme formed a culminating point for the Arthurian romance.  It’s a good story device; it doesn’t really matter what it really is, as long as it stands for truth, justice and the “right” way.  Its physical presence is just like the True Cross, Longinus’ Spear, St. Michael’s pickled peritoneum, or any other “holy” relic: e.g. entrepreneurs started fabricating bits of the true cross as soon as they noticed a market for it; as we’ve seen from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the DeVinci Code, and Newsweek, people are still making big bucks selling new baubles to hang on the old artificial tree, which is patently, the Grail’s only real value.  When you get right down to it, it’s buying a box of air, isn’t it?  That’s the way faith works, so have fun with the storyline.

Incidentally, Christ is the Greek Chrestos – a mystery cult popular with the poor and lower middle class of the 1st century C.E.  Self-proclaimed “Apostle” Paul of Tarsus cobbled Chrestos with the historical Jesus movement as a sales package for Gentiles (infuriating the Jesus movement because he co-opted and lied about their guy; of such petty human foibles are great religious movements conceived), but that’s another story.

REVERY:

We’ve come a long way, you and I.  Thousands upon thousands of light years, and yet we’re still far short of our destination.  Where were we going anyway?  Haven’t we already been there?  The universe is a big round circle in a dimension so large that we poor mites cannot see the curve.  It looks like a straight line to us, but so does time, and time is a repetition of itself, always telling us the same thing.  As each generation is born, the next arises, and each of those, and all of those billions more, grows by the same learning process, through the same biology, give or take a tenth of a percent of one gene, which seems to specify skin tone and what we call racial differences.  It’s the same as classifying men by the size of their nipples and finally as insignificant.

We all begin as fertilized eggs.  We are one with the chicken and the salamander, fish and spider.

There is not one atom within us that is remarkable for being unique.  There is nothing unique in the universe, except individual discovery.

LINK WORTH VIEWING:

Washington Diarist by Leon Wieseltier, Accommodationism:  “One of the most troublesome qualities of reason is that it is not always reasonable.”

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=cf4e433c-60bd-4184-abc3-fc372c7f8304

Little King Rides Again.

“Starry Night Market”

COMMON LIVES (?)

I never wanted to succeed within the system. I always fancied an independent existence, and have been resentful at having to go back to the system – time and again – in order to survive. They’ve got the medicine, books, roofs and most of the food. I’ve met survivalists and read about them: pro-, con-, and how-to. I don’t want to scratch out a marginal living on the edge of wilderness; I don’t want to divorce community. I want to live a free, reasonably unencumbered, but comfortable life, serving the greater good as I am given to perceive it. I ardently wish to avoid corporate connection; they are too goddamned connected. They are invasive in our lives far beyond routine and poorly imagined governmental civil surveillance. The corporatists would enslave us and are working to achieve that. Fascism – the merger of corporations with the state is Mussolini’s original definition – is aggressively reasserting ascendance over worldwide society. It is time for the rest of us to fight for our lives and freedoms again. We must destroy the present royal corporatists and make corporations serve the nation that enabled them again. We do not exist for them!

Life is much shorter at the back end than it is at the front – duh. The days, weeks, months, and years speed by at ever-increasing pace – as the universe seems to be doing. The older earth is beyond ripe and well into rot. There are too many of us and we are breeding. Species in danger of extinction over breed just before the lights go out – it’s a screwed-up survival thing that only works if the species has the room and resources to make it work.

I’ve thought long and hard about what to post in this blog. There is a plethora of crisis and dispute, a right royal battle between good and evil, rich against poor, corporatist plutocrats against democracy, and truth versus fiction.  Most of the topics and alarms I’ve had to share, I have shared. They are now common lament from progressive to mainstream media, and even right wing media acknowledges them by manically denying their existence. Glenn Beck holds rallies to celebrate the void. The Repuglicons stand for greed and despoliation; they would defoliate the planet to make a lousy useless buck; they’d sacrifice their own grandmothers for a bus token. My guess is that they will be huddled in a cave eating pieces of our corpses as the seas rise, the winds howl and the sun bakes the earth flat in the wasteland they created. Honest to the Big Sky-borne Nincompoop, they can have that.

[NOTE: We need a Progressive Revolution: defeat all Repuglicons, Koch brothers Tea Potty goons, corporatist democrats and racist "blue dog" democrats. Most specifically, do not support racists, reject them and reject racism. Racism sucks! Keep your eye on the prize: we have a world to potentially save].

Paul Ryan, the Great Stinker

RECOGNIZE THE ENEMY:

Rupert Murdoch bought National Geographic. The NG Channel has now produced a bio-documentary about Rudy Giuliani’s “gallant” 911 actions in his own words.  Every fire fighter and public safety officer in New York should be insulted and enraged by it. Ask them how contemptible Rudy’s words are to them. He is at the top of the neocon shill list. However did we give way to all of these crap talkers? NatGeo also spews a lot of the bible as “history” crap – the old scientific National Geo would have laughed the script right out of production in the flicker of an eyelash.

Ben Stein narrates a “docu-drama-mentary” about Creative Design being conspired against by “rotten old scientists.” We should give him a new show entitled: “Ben Stein Will Do ANYTHING For Money!”  Ben would have us throw out the Enlightenment and revert to the Stone Age. Virgin sacrifice, I suppose, what a sick puppy Ben turns out to be – a whack-a-mole salesman for loan sharks and decrier of reason. Some intellectual. Why do we have to put degenerate theories and philosophies in our public schools? It is insanely self-destructive to accommodate these know-nothing morons who would be our overlords. Why do we want our children to be ignorant and dumb?

An American Carol – Three ghosts visit an anti-American filmmaker – who is obviously a Michael Moore ringer – to show him the “true” meaning of the nation. It’s not about people: it is about “Free enterprise” – as controlled by the narrow-minded few, in opposition to the great unwashed horde of sub-human immigrants, and the uppity middle class.

The recently sold-out History Channel just pumped out a series entitled the Bible; it is a re-telling of the same old King James nonsense without much intellectual or scientific balance. It is superstitious religious memory transmitted as fact to further propagandize and confuse our increasingly gullible public. We are losing the truth to these greedy self-interested relativists.

Poor Beleaguered Billionaires

Koch brothers – here are the most “do anything for money guys.” They fight to make their dollars more important than human lives or nature’s health. They are the ultimate arrogant my-cash-makes-me-special sleaze balls among our self-designated would-be “landed elite.” These high-handed thieves are traitors worse than Benedict Arnold. Common to Arnold they are trying to turn the country over to plutocrats – an aristocracy of the rich – a king (who may be the megalomaniac and vicious Charles or devious mealy-mouthed David Koch) – piss ants, working against the nation, humanity, reason and posterity around the world just to stay rich. They do NOT know what’s right for the rest of us; they don’t care about us; they consider us cannon fodder and/or wage slaves to be used and discarded at their august petty filthy and sick grandiose will.

No more grievous immediate threat to our free nation exists than the traitorous Repuglicon Radical Right and their corporatist masters. If I had the influence, I would call the people to battle against the corporate monopolists and their fundamentalist toady right wing allies today. “Kill all royal corporate charters!” Let them know that we are coming for them. It’s judgment day for corporatist thieves and would-be kings, like the Kochs. Things Get Worse with Koch! (And, that goes for all the rest of the Mitt Romney-Loyd Blankfein, Business roundtable, Chamber of Commerce and Tea Potty crowd).

Anti-American Terrorists

We Move to Amend.We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

• Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
• Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count.
• Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate “preemption” actions by global, national, and state governments.

Signed by 283,041 and counting . . . CONTACT: http://www.movetoamend.org/

Liberty crowning defiant American democracy.

The ONLY sure cure for the planet and the country is to CLEAN HOUSE OF REPUGLICONS AND TEA POTTIERS.

The Republicans are bought into the craziness at a very deep level.  They will not get better.  They will explode or fizzle out, but they will not get “well.”  These sick puppies prefer revolution and the overthrow of the United States government to honest political dialog and debate.  We really need to put these crazies into the booby hatch. At very least, we must stop giving them political credibility.

The political instrument of moneyed elites, and a retrograde societal force, the GOP today is more negative than ever.  Its agenda, if fully implemented, would prove catastrophic. Here’s what an unfettered Republican Party would do “for” America:

1)      Greatly reduce or entirely eliminate taxes on the rich, forcing working families to make up revenue shortfalls.

2)      Bust labor unions, and prevent collective bargaining for wages and benefits.

3)      Stubbornly deny the climate change while pumping more pollutants into the environment from dirty industries and practices.

4)      Remove regulations on investment banks and credit card companies eroding consumer protections.

5)      Continue to criticize and under fund public education, advocating private schooling instead, to dumb workers down.

6)      Outlaw abortion, under a moral guise, impelling thousands of functioning females to perish because of sexist denials of their basic rights.

7)      Continue to recite a Pledge of Allegiance whose last six words are “with liberty and justice for all,” while harassing homosexual citizens.

8)      Speak often and loftily of freedom, but engage in neo-McCarthyite witch hunts, Red-baiting name calling, and a host of Patriot Act sins against the U. S. Constitution in the name of “national security.”

9)      Bully the world with US aggressions on foreign soil, kill countless thousands of innocents, waste billions of badly-needed dollars, and make us hated around the planet.

10)  Generally drive down the income levels of America’s working-class majority, as a cost-saving corporate measure, dooming society to economic ruin!

11)  Lie about affordable health care for all, creating a national security threat by fooling some Americans into thinking that public health care is a godless socialist attack on basic American freedoms.

12)  Unleash de facto ethnic cleansing against 12 million immigrant men, women, and children, blaming them for hardships experienced due to capitalist excess.

13)  Shamefully try to revise the Bible to obscure passages that place human need before abject greed as one conservative group is really trying to do!

14)  Support intensely bigoted hatred that has crazed extremists dreaming of literally tearing Barack Obama to pieces and gassing all liberals.

15)  Place the livelihoods and lives of over 300 million Americans in the hands of incompetent ideological “purists” such as Grover Norquist and Paul Ryan.

While there are certainly Democrats who’ve yet to show spine in furtherance of vital change, let’s be absolutely clear about the unmitigated disaster that would follow if Republicans, in their present ultra-rightist incarnation, ruled our country exactly as they wickedly wished.

“So how about those Mets? Hear about the Big Meteor? Almost the size of a refrigerator, they say!”

While the press keeps us dazzled with meteors, this…
New record low Arctic sea ice extent, reached in September 2012, compared to the average summer minimum extent for the last 30 years in yellow. Source: NASA. http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/02/15-6

Sierra Club president just said that we have to knock off two-thirds of all petrochemical sources now extant if we hope to have a chance. The powers and the public have their heads so far up their own “rabbit holes” “under the sand” that they only see daylight when they pass more gas.
And, Obama’s guys are thinking fracking for gas isn’t such a bad thing!
‘Forward’ on Fracking? Obama Scientist Makes Industry-Friendly Push for Gas Drilling Bonanza.
Despite grave concerns about methane emissions and groundwater contamination signals show that White House push forward with controversial gas fracking.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/02/16-0

WHY DON’T WE ALL CHIP IN AND GET THESE GUYS A CRIMINAL INDICTMENT?

Excerpt, COMMON LIVES, an unpublished novel.

There was a clean Latino man in the seat beside Eugene on the Greyhound bus, who alternately dozed, or read from Antoine Saint Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars.  His clothes were clean: dark new Levis and a good blue cotton denim shirt.  He also had a clean white straw cowboy hat with a sedate blue and white band.  Tucked under his elbow, between his body and the window wall of the bus was a new black leather jacket – not the kind bikers wore, but a skirted coat a gentleman might wear to take a lady out.  He also had a small brown paper bag with food for the trip – sausage and cheese, baguette of French bread, small condiments, crackers, fruits and vegetables in sealed plastic sacks.

Eugene met him when their bus driver narrowly avoided collision with a highballing semi-trailer headed north in a hurry.  Eugene banged into his seatmate as the bus made a wild swing onto and off the shoulder of the road.

“Sorry!” Eugene yelped, more frightened than he wanted to be.

“No problem!” the man said, clinging to the seat in front of them with one strong brown hand.  Saint-Exupéry was clutched securely in the other.

“Some drivers,” Eugene said as their driver regained control.

“Guess he has to make some time.”

“Eugene Formsby,” Eugene introduced himself on impulse, holding out his hand.

“Armand Garcia,” Armand said, shaking Eugene’s hand.

“Headed for Portland?” Eugene asked.  Armand’s hand was hard as horn.

“Wilsonville,” Armand replied.  “I follow the crops.”

“You’re a migrant worker?” Eugene asked in disbelief.  Armand fit none of the stereotypes.  He was clean and neat.  He wasn’t traveling in a caravan of scruffy dirty brown men.  He wasn’t drunk.

“Somebody’s gotta do it,” Armand said reasonably.  He smiled.  He had even white teeth, obviously well-cared-for beneficiaries of good professional dental attention.  “It’s a good livin’, if you don’t blow it all on booze and women.  A lotta the guys do that: make a little money and piss it all away.  They’re stupid.  Sure, it’s a little bit of money here, but it’s a lot where I come from.  I send my money home.  I got a wife and kids in Mexico.”

“Did I see you reading Saint Exupéry?” Eugene asked, fascinated.  He was meeting an industrious Mexican migrant farm worker – a clean one with a sense of responsibility.  The world was truly a marvelous place.

“Yes,” Armand said promptly.  “Would you like to hear a passage?”

“Well…?”

“And suddenly,” Armand read, “I had a vision of the face of destiny.  Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame.  No one ever helped you to escape.  You, like a termite, built your peace by locking up with cement every chink and cranny through which light might pierce.  You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conversations of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars.  You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man.  You are not the dweller upon an errant planet, and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers.  You are a petty bourgeois to Toulouse.  Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time.  Now the clay from which you were shaped has hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.’

“Good stuff, ain’t it?” Armand asked, smiling.

“It’s uncanny,” Eugene replied, nonplused.  Did someone send you here to read that to me?  He wondered, imagining all sorts of divine interventions and messages from Beyond.

“I’m tryin’ to improve my mind,” Armand said amiably.  “I don’t always wanna be pickin’ crops.  That’s stupid.  Gonna kill my back one day and then I won’t be able to do it anymore.  I’m thinkin’ of studyin’ book-keepin’.  What do you think?”

“Well, book-keeping is a reliable occupation,” Eugene said seriously, dismayed that the reader of Saint Exupéry was going to intentionally crash land in the desert.

“I was thinkin’ more along the line of tax preparation, ya’ know?”

“Uh-ha,” Eugene replied, nodding. 

“You’ve got a family?” Armand asked politely.

“No.”

“You should have a wife and children,” Armand said reasonably.  “They make your life mean something.  A lot of those guys I work with, they don’t know that.  They don’t work for the family.  They come up here and get drunk and wild and land in jail, or get run outta the country by the INS.  Stupid sonsabitches.”

“INS,” Eugene said, “that’s Immigration Naturalization Service?”

“That’s them.  They’re not too bad if you don’t get stupid.”

“You get hassled?”

“Sometimes, but I travel by bus and keep pretty much to myself.  Some of those other guys all chip in, ya’ know?  Buy an old junker car.  They get a little drunked up and ride along about a hundred miles an hour and get busted by a local cop.  Man, that’s stupid!  Local cops can be real mean.”

“I didn’t know migrant workers came all the way up to Oregon.”

“Sure, all the time.  We follow the crop right up into Canada.  We’re chasing the harvests, don’t ya’ know?”

“Well, yeah, sure, I know that.  That’s what migrants do.”  Eugene felt stupid.

Sometime around noon, the bus broke down.

“I always bite off a hard chunk,” Armand said as they stood by the side of the road.  The bus was disabled, its rear hatch open, smoky steam clouding up into the cool Oregon air in thin wet tendrils.  Passengers stood straggled along the roadway, or seated on their luggage, which had been removed in preparation for a relief bus, which was expected “momentarily” for the past two hours and twenty-three minutes.  Passing motorists speeding by on their way north glanced curiously at the stranded bus riders.  No highway patrolman appeared.  The driver smoked cigarettes, paced and scowled, stopping periodically to deal with impatient frustrated passengers.

“A hard chunk?” Eugene asked disinterestedly, holding Armand’s dog-eared Saint-Exupéry, which he’d asked to see.  He longed for the relief bus.  He leaned into its vision, hoping that it would soon put an end to his seemingly endless return to Portland.  Perhaps the fates were trying to tell him something – like, maybe, you’re a loser, go no farther.

“If it’s hard to chew,” Armand continued, “I try to spit it out.  If it don’t spit out, I have to tough my way through.  Life is like that; you don’t get to spit the damn thing out, until you croak.”

Reassuring, Eugene thought.

“I been thinkin’ lately on how man is an animal,” Armand said seriously.  “Unlike the other animals, he’s the only one who gets to remember much of anythin’ – includin’ hates and discontents – and the only one who knows he’s gonna die.  Pretty depressin’.  It’s also the human condition which everybody reads about – which some people think died out with those Frenchmen, sittin’ in Paris cafes, stickin’ knives in their hands to make a point durin’ the Nazi occupation; or walkin’ the beaches in self-exile in plague-ridden Morocco.  Camus had it bad.  Malraux and Sartre, all those thoughtful Frenchmen.  All life’s absurd.  It’s the human condition.  Man’s fate.  It all comes home.”

Eugene stared at Armand.

“Hey, who are those guys?” Armand asked with sudden concern.

Eugene looked around.  There were about a dozen, furtive men trying to slip into the small crowd of stranded bus riders.  The men fit Eugene’s stereotype: dirty, rough-looking Latino laborers, wearing faded jeans, straw hats, black mustaches, flannel shirts and heavy, thick-soled shoes.

“Shit,” Armand said furiously.  “Fuckin’ wetbacks ruin it for everybody!  Stupid motherfuckers!”

“What are they doing here?” Eugene asked nervously.

“I don’t know,” Armand replied angrily.  “Catchin’ the bus, I guess!  The stupid mother fuckers are gettin’ tickets from the mother fuckin’ driver!”

Sure enough, Eugene saw the newcomers line up, clutching their money in grimed hands, pressing it on the surly Greyhound bus representative in his surly-gray bus driver’s suit.  As he watched, a trio of official white sedans pulled off onto the shoulder of the road behind the bus.  A second trio of sedans and a large white van pulled up in front.

The next few moments were bedlam.

The laborers began running in all directions.  To Eugene’s horror, Armand went with them.  Men in dark blue bulletproof vests and matching ball caps ran past Eugene in hot pursuit.  The pursuers wore badges and the large letters INS were stenciled across their backs.  They were armed with batons and carried side arms at their belts.  Within minutes, the laborers returned, singly and in pairs, their hands handcuffed behind them, escorted by officers into the back of the white van.  Eugene saw Armand among the last herded up to captivity.  Armand did not see him.  The van was sealed, the officers returned to their vehicles, got in and drove away, leaving a gaping busload of passengers still stranded at the side of the road.

The surly Greyhound bus driver looked furtively at all the ticket money he’d just collected and pocketed it.  He glanced nervously at the passengers and smiled at a nearby older woman, who looked at him disapprovingly, thinking his unctuous smile the most terrible anomaly thus far in a terrible trip.

My God! Eugene thought. Armand is a wetback!  A goddamned literate wetback! How do I meet these guys?  Why do I meet these guys? What the hell?

The relief bus arrived almost immediately thereafter and Eugene climbed aboard gratefully, still carrying Armand’s copy of Saint-Exupéry.  He sat down with the book in his lap.  Armand would stay on his mind for a long time, maybe for life; he had only touched the surface.   He wished him well, commending him to his Catholic or Indian gods, or Sir Isaac Newton, perhaps.  Impossibly, he hoped he would meet him again.  He looked down at Saint-Exupéry and opened it to the part Armand had marked.  He read:

“No one ever helped you to escape.  You, like a termite, built your peace by locking up with cement every chink and cranny through which light might pierce.  You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conversations of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars.  You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man.” 

Eugene turned to the first page and began to read.

UNITED FARM WORKERS :

To provide farm workers and other working people with the inspiration and tools to share in society’s bounty

http://www.ufw.org/

Time Out for Reason

It’s easy to become buried under the avalanche of bad news rushing over us; easy to become discouraged and fatalistic.  Shakespeare wisely and famously mused,  “To be or not to be, that is the question.  Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to seize arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them.”

The overall point of the exploration – from my perspective – is to know.  I’ve found that keeping the goal simple is best.  The persons benefiting from the robberies, rapes and murders do not care about any patterns or even predictable outcomes.  As long as they are profiting in some wise, the behavior goes unchecked.  As to the rest of us, we generally seem to suffer in silence until the pain becomes too great, and then we produce the predictable outcomes mentioned above.  I often think of Cassandra predicting the fall of Troy when I am contemplating the latest “I told you so” in the news.  Really bad case of “Nobody ever listens to me.”

I spent a few years, fifteen years ago, trying to inform the county commissioners of our great land that the West and Midwest are for sure running out of water.  The environment is observably in major transition and we are losing the human-friendly ecosystem that greatly enabled our planetary success.  Do we act to conserve what we’ve got?  No, of course not.  The powers that be commission studies to postpone action so that the last possible penny can be squeezed out of whatever the exploited resource might be.  Hence, I am contemptuous of the bozos that use the cliché, “Well, we lost ‘it’ in California (Birmingham, Detroit, wherever), but we still have a chance to save it here.”  I want to yell at them, “It didn’t need saving until you assholes showed up!”  Many also believe that someone or thing is going to save them before it’s “too late”.  They’re wrong.

I’ve gone back and forth on the meaning of life.  I conclude that Monte Python made the definitive statement on the subject: “Every sperm is sacred.”  That coupled with the Life of Brian – particularly the crucifixion chorus singing, The Bright Side of Life while hanging on their crosses.  There you go, all said and done.  Don’t even have to read Nietzsche or Sartre.  I prefer the light side to the dark, humor to grim acceptance (although there are times for each, I admit).  Still, I find myself more Zen than anything else, plus a strong, strong touch of Deist.  Don’t know if that latter is because of my erratic Roman Catholic upbringing, but I do believe in some sort of life force, great spirit, for want of another word, god.  For all I know though, god may be a composite of all souls, or a board of directors somewhere, or an alien playing space invaders.  Believing in a god doesn’t preclude the overwhelming sense that the world is one big turkey shoot and loony bin.  If the divine being has some sort of purpose, other than hanging out and looking at stuff, I have yet to discern it, but then who am I?  Moses, He talks to; Me, He doesn’t call, He doesn’t write…

Learning history has value in finding out that all the crap around you has happened in some form before you – not once but probably hundreds, if not thousands of times, or even more – and the world went on as if nothing mattered and there’s the key, I think.  As the in-country Vietnam vets used to say, “Don’t mean nothing.”  The insanity finally reaches a point of such overwhelming monstrosity that all one can do is cover up in the fetal position and whimper, or throw one’s head back and laugh like hell.

Everything we do is good and/or bad, it’s all interconnected, and each generation sees the world as new, and never before traveled – until it’s probably too damn late to correct for a wayward course.

Corporatists destroyed the New Deal and bankrupted the people of the United States, shoved them into war, and took their jobs and personal freedoms away.  Those of us who care, who are American, who are democrats – small “d” – are most in danger and must destroy the corporatists and re-instate the New Deal, or we are lost.  We shall be slaves of corporate masters for evermore.  We must live as if people mattered, not to protect stupid-ass property rights, or spend our lives at the level of swine.  Do you understand why their masters murdered slaves, serfs and peasants who learned to read?  The New Medievalism is just around the bend.

RELATED ARTICLE: CRUSHING AMERICA

 

Execution by Stoning: not just a sadistic bible tradition.

An Iranian woman at a protest in Brussels highlights the barbarity of death by stoning, in which women are buried up to their necks in front of a crowd of volunteers. Photograph: Thierry Roge/Reuters

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