Say that you have trained them well:
They are the oiled machinations of war,
performing as expected.
Refrain from saying “professionals,”
and the usual nonsense about “surgical strikes.”
They were never doctors and nurses
in starched, white linens.

The best heroes are dead ones—
mortified and mortared.
They neither complain nor contradict.
They don’t re-live “friendly fire” incidents,
the sonofabitch sargeant-sadist,
nor the rapist in their midst.
They don’t see again
the faces of traumatized children.
Their bones stretch to attention under the sod.

The man and woman who will kill and injure
because some fool tells them to
are just little spin-off fools.
No act born of ignorance is heroic.
Heroes are sensible, not imbeciles.
Heroes dispel myths; they neither create
nor perpetuate them.

The fully manifested hero,
aware of his power and dignity,
is more than human, is humane.

Heroes don’t talk about heroes.
They need no confetti showered in their faces.
They question; they learn; they challenge; they act
according to their own honed principles:
What is truth? for example;
what is honor?

One Law for Lion and Ox is Oppression.

— William Blake

Where is the place of understanding?  Where is wisdom to be found?

— The  Book of Job

Info coming at us at the speed of light—gigabytes per nano-sec—and our horse-and-buggy bio-chem brains struggle with ancient grammars, syntaxes and texts!  Even our metaphors are now wretchedly overwrought: Not, “how to connect the dots,” but how to perceive, measure, record and duck the shot-gunned info-pellets rushing at our faces!  No wonder the world has gone gaga—not Lady!—for predictions!  “The world is too much with us,” so maybe those Mayan calendrical types knew a thing or two.  Maybe Nostradamus.  Maybe Cayce.  Somebody must know something!

Last decade, in September, ‘07, I posted a piece called “Can the Left and Right Unite?”  That was long before President “Hopey-Changey” had risen on his rhetorical pinions just long enough to foist on the gullible–one of the best bait-and-switch” acts in U.S. political history.  It was a year before the Lehman Brothers “Great Recession” began; before TARP; before Europe’s implosion; before Tahrir Square; before the B.P. and Fukushima disasters; before the Tea Party and Occupy Movements; before Bin Laden’s and Saddam’s and Kim’s and Gaddafi’s demise, and Representative Giffords’ near-demise; before the Supreme Court sanctified corporate, financial, electoral control; before the National Defense Authorization Act, etc.!

Four years ago, the chief divisions in the country had to do with prosecuting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and most Americans were united in thinking “terrorists” the enemy, but not sure how to get them.  Nobody had declared the American homeland a “battlefield” in the War on Terror—with all the ominous implications of such a designation.

Now, the war in Afghanistan slogs on, and the shadow of our wars in Mesopotamia will haunt us through the ages.  The possibility of war with Iran is a warmonger’s wet-dream now—and the sheets are gross and soggy.  Now, perhaps, it can begin to be said and heard: It was Bushwhackian, Rumsfeldian, Cheney-Reese and Powellesque, Pearle and Wolfowitz idiocy to attack Iraq; and our heedless diversion and waste of resources has helped to bankrupt us financially and morally.  We’ve continued to hammer, frack and bomb our egg of a planet and now we’re dancing on a thin eggshell—and we’re mostly tap-dancing alone, not waltzing with a willing partner.

Not impressed by Obama’s card-shark, Mac-the-Knife routine, I sat out the last presidential election and urged others to purposively—not apathetically–do so, too.  But that was then.

As of now, there is only one candicate for whom I’d seriously consider voting.

The main reasons are: (1) He’s the only one who talks about our over-extended “Empire.”  He actually uses that word!  (2) He’s the most anti-war.  He talks about employing diplomacy a lot more and military force a lot less.  Give brains a chance!  (3) He is the only candidate who wants to abolish the Fed—and offers sound reasons for doing so.  (4) He presents well-reasoned arguments, not “9-9-9” style gibberish.  (5) He has argued his beliefts carefully and consistently for decades.  (6) His personal life has been a model of good citizenship and family values.

I’m talking about Ron Paul, of course, and I can hear the clamor of my “progressive” (formerly, “liberal”) friends wondering if I, too, have lost my prayer beads.  So, here’s my take: If we lived in a truly “free” society, where the masses had access to the skinny about how the System works, the high and growing levels of corruption and decadence in every branch of our government—federal, state, local—and if we had an educated working class, making the best-informed tactical and strategic moves to advance common values, able to work their way through the morass of media-corporate-government hype and propaganda… I’d say, Hold off, final victory will be ours!

But nothing today smells remotely like that!  This is not Sweden, Iceland, Switzerland, nor is it Never-Neverland where people don’t grow old and sick and tired and die.  We are a globe-straddling Empire, imposing our lifestyle and disposing of our opponents with engineered coups and revolutions, and our modus operandi is more akin to Tony Soprano’s than to the amorphous “good guys” we esteem ourselves. Surveiling and managing the planet, in ways that are often nasty and devious, we are well along the usual trajectory of past “super-powers”: expansion, over-expansion, attacks abroad and crumbling infrastructure within, and, finally, kaput, nada, nada y nada! 

We’ve always been an Empire—check out latter correspondence between Jefferson and Adams. … Our nastiest business, our Civil War, had a lot more to do with managing the newly acquired Western territories—agrarian or industrial motif?—than with freeing slaves.  (Do we really think recently arrived Irish immigrants wanted nothing more than to get drafted into “Mr. Lincoln’s War”?  Check out the New York City draft riots for a quick refresher!)

We like to tell ourselves we’re the kind of people who only go to war for noble reasons, but the fact is… we’ve been the most successful conquerors in human history and we’ve stirred up hornet’s nests everywhere.  We have been the “Now” people, barely looking back, whose forward motion has been propelled by carrots dangled by illusionists.

When the present moment is as slippery as this one, people are apt to take solace in nostalgia for simpler times or in  fantasizing a better tomorrow.  (When miscreants like Newt Gingrich are taken seriously as “historians,” you know we’ve got serious problems about learning from our past!)  About “tomorrow”–we’re a species condemned to hope.  Hope and Imagination are always “leaps of faith,” but they work better when they are informed.

Eighteenth-century “Romantic” poet Blake was on the cusp of England’s Industrial Revolution—and he didn’t like the smell of things!  A visionary from childhood, seeing angels in trees, he thought anyone could be a prophet… so long as they carefully examined life whirling around them and life within.  “Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d,” he wrote.  Two hundred years later, our crystal balls are murky and all our messengers are suspect.

As we spin out of whirligig 2011 into the free-fall gravity of 2012, about information-overload, we may cry out with Job, “Where is the place of understanding?  Where is wisdom to be found?”

The U.S. has done some terrible things in this world and some would say we’ve been in a kind of karmic blow-back since 2001.  We collectively grieve, rightly so, at the horror of a woman losing her parents and three children in a Christmas-day blaze in Connecticut.  How senseless, tragic and bizarre!  Can a loving God permit such horrors on Christmas day?  To understand the kind of tragedy that has befallen Iraqis since our invasion and continuing occupation, one would have to multiply the Stamford horror about 1 million times over the past eight years!

Not because he has done evil, but simply to test and prove his faith and goodness, Job’s children and grandchildren are killed, his cattle killed, and he is cursed with boils.  And his wife asks, “Dost thou still retain thy integrity?  Curse God and die.”  She is empathetic; she sees her husband’s searing wounds and advises him to choose the oblivion of death instead.  Job tells her to stop talking foolishness; he will suffer much more, if need be.  And…, he does.  And before it all ends with a show of force and a little more info—straight from the Whirlwind’s mouth!—about how things really work, Job tells his three comforters (really, intellectual tormentors), “Till I die, I will not remove my integrity from me.”

“Integrity” is the key word in this extraordinary, pre-Grecian drama.  And if we are going to get through our next pivotal year intact — and, very likely, re-constituted — it is essential that we understand that concept the way it was meant back then.  It is similar to our word “integer” or single unit, and its meaning has a Taoistic, Asian flavoring rather than our looser, modern sense of “general honesty” or “decency”—difficult and noble as those virtues are.  Rather, the sense here is of “wholeness.”  Job can no sooner remove his identity than he can remove his skin.  His integrity is all-of-a-piece with whom he is—his identity, his being.

Now for Blake: the ox has his “integrity” being an ox, and the lion his just being him.  Both are powerful with legit claims on the world to sustain them as they are and wish to be.  You wouldn’t want to pull a wagon with two lions and you wouldn’t want to take down a wildebeast with a couple of oxen.  Each has its place, each does its thing; and if the lion can lie down with the lamb, he can also lie down with the ox.

Everywhere one looks in the world today one sees tension and divisions, strife, a lack of clarity, and a constant resort to the dialogue of guns, knives and bombs.  Did we fight the Cold War only to inherit a world gone mad, dividing along ancient fault-lines—Sunni/Shiite, Jewish/Muslim, Christian/Muslim–and along new ones of class?  Half of all Americans are at 200% or less of the poverty level for a family of four.  To put it another way, fifty percent of us are not “getting by” or just barely getting by, and most of those who are “better off” are scared as hell.  And people who are scared are easily manipulated—especially when doused with fear of foreign threats.  (Just ask Goebbels!)

Amidst the maya of illusions and delusions, we stumble along in our made-up world.  We can only see through a glass darkly, and the glass is a fifty-inch wide-screen HDTV with surround sound—and 3-D is coming!  Amidst the maya, we lose precision in our language, our discourse, our thinking, our literature, our relations with each other, with the powerful and with the downtrodden.  Professor Gingrich, commenting on Herman Caine’s alleged sexual abuses, remarks that he is “sorry for he and his famly.”  That’s it!  I’m outta hea’!   Here’s a guy who brags about being an “historian” and the two dozen books he’s written, and he doesn’t know the objective case of pronouns?

I don’t put much stock in American elections anymore.  (Maybe we need “international observers”… but who do we trust?)  The best one can hope for is what Ed Sullivan would call, “a really good shew.”  We put far too much faith in the figurehead of our president when our history since Kennedy should have shown us that even a top banana can be easily peeled—exploded in the public square, and then re-packaged as an aberrance, anomoly, a myth.  So now we’re stuck with this: Even an election victory that championed populist values of both the Left and the Right would be hemmed in by thousands of special interests and lobbysists, not to mention billions of contrapuntal bucks!

That’s what we’re up against… and any New Populist campaign must recognize those electronic realities.  Nevertheless, such a campaign would mean a voice raised and heeded.  It would mean a resurgence of resistance to the Neoliberal agenda of war and exploitation that both Left and Right can now oppose.

The best reason for the lion and the ox to collaborate is, ironically, to maintain their integrity!  Because the Corporate State is rapidly robbing all of us of cherished core values like “live and let live,” a “helping hand,” “all in the same boat” and the “individualism” essential to thinking and acting without duress.  The media mish-mash of sounds and images adds to the kaleidoscopic confusion, and no one seems to have remembered to unwind a string as we approach the Minotaur’s lair.

The real enemy of Occupiers and Tea-partiers is not the other guy, but the faraway robotic types guiding the predator drones above our global rafters.  How do you make sense of it all when you’re beaten down and scared of losing your home, your job, your health, your family?

For years I was for a woman’s right to choose… and I still am.  But, when I heard Paul speak of his experience as a young doctor, going into one hospital room where an aborted fetus had been unceremoniously discarded and walking down the hall into another where every effort was being made to save a mother and her life-endangered baby… I saw his opposition from another point of view, and felt the sincerity of that point of view.  Now, to counter-argue, one might say that to prevent the need for abortions better sex education should be available.  And that adoptions should be encouraged, etc.

Better sex education… and better every kind of education!  Had we not fallen so notoriously behind in our test scores, we might not be in the mess we’re in now.  Had we paid attention to the infrastructure of education, bridges, public utilities, transportation and communication, the Arts, we’d be able to get through this next hell of a year standing together, with a lot more equanimity.

“Opposition is true Friendship,” Blake wrote.

The “separation of Church and State” that Americans cherish was never meant to be a separation of morals and the State.  Yet, it is our moral core, our “integrity,” that has been lost amidst the funhouse mirrors of commercialism, consumerism, militarism, ethnocentrism, more and more and more.

In this winter of our discontent, the war clouds gather and austerity miseries grind the souls of those who have no homes, or broken homes.  We’re in a poisoned mine shaft and the canaries are singing. … Can we interpret their varied notes in time?

When in the course of human events
WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS

It becomes necessary for one people
IT BECOMES NECESSARY FOR ONE PEOPLE

To dissolve the political bands…
TO DISSOLVE THE POLITICAL BANDS…

To make their own music,
TO MAKE THEIR OWN MUSIC,

And to dance in the streets with joy–
AND TO DANCE IN THE STREETS WITH JOY–

Let us be those people!
LET US BE THOSE PEOPLE!

When one people
WHEN ONE PEOPLE

Shall demand redress of grievances
SHALL DEMAND REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES

Let us be those people!
LET US BE THOSE PEOPLE!

Let our hearts be full of courage and compassion!
LET OUR HEARTS BE FULL OF COURAGE AND COMPASSION!

Let our minds be full of clarity and light!
LET OUR MINDS BE FULL OF CLARITY AND LIGHT!

Learning, ever learning;
LEARNING, EVER LEARNING;

Striving, ever striving–
STRIVING, EVER STRIVING–

Forging a new tomorrow!
FORGING A NEW TOMORROW!

We hold these truths to be self-evident:
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT:

That all men and women are created unequal.
THAT ALL MEN AND WOMEN ARE CREATED UNEQUAL!

Tall and short, smart and less-so;
TALL AND SHORT, SMART AND LESS-SO;

Black and white, red, brown and yellow–
BLACK AND WHITE, RED, BROWN AND YELLOW–

All have something to contribute!
ALL HAVE SOMETHING TO CONTRIBUTE!

Some are thrifty and some are spendthrift.
SOME ARE THRIFTY AND SOME ARE SPENDTHRIFT.

Some lean Left and some lean Right.
SOME LEAN LEFT AND SOME LEAN RIGHT.

Nevertheless…
NEVERTHELESS…

No one has the right to hurt another.
NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO HURT ANOTHER.

No one has the right to cheat or lie or steal,
NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO CHEAT OR LIE OR STEAL,

or exploit the labor of another!
OR EXPLOIT THE LABOR OF ANOTHER!

While we are not equal…
WHILE WE ARE NOT EQUAL…

No one is inferior!
NO ONE IS INFERIOR!

All can be taught, and everyone can learn!
ALL CAN BE TAUGHT, AND EVERYONE CAN LEARN!

The divine light in all can be honored.
THE DIVINE LIGHT IN ALL CAN BE HONORED.

We have to learn from each other.
WE HAVE TO LEARN FROM EACH OTHER.

We’re in the same lifeboat together!
WE’RE IN THE SAME LIFEBOAT TOGETHER!

From all, according to their abilities;
FROM ALL, ACCORDING TO THEIR ABILITIES;

To all, according to their needs!
TO ALL, ACCORDING TO THEIR NEEDS!

Marx said that.
MARX SAID THAT.

Not Groucho, but Karl.
NOT GROUCHO, BUT KARL.

The problem is…
THE PROBLEM IS…

Who will determine the need?
WHO WILL DETERMINE THE NEED?

That has always been a problem. …
THAT HAS ALWAYS BEEN A PROBLEM. …

Where to draw the line. …
WHERE TO DRAW THE LINE. …

Who will judge the judges?
WHO WILL JUDGE THE JUDGES?

Even the Romans said so!
EVEN THE ROMANS SAID SO!

This is where…
THIS IS WHERE…

Humility comes in. …
HUMILITY COMES IN. …

This is where…
THIS IS WHERE…

Reverence for life
REVERENCE FOR LIFE

And Truth
AND TRUTH

Comes in. …
COMES IN. …

This is where
THIS IS WHERE

We reach for our highest selves!
WE REACH FOR OUR HIGHEST SELVES!

Because the stakes are monumental!
BECAUSE THE STAKES ARE MONUMENTAL!

We are star-beings in the making
WE ARE STAR-BEINGS IN THE MAKING

of a glorious universe–
OF A GLORIOUS UNIVERSE–

Unfolding, ever evolving…
UNFOLDING, EVER EVOLVING…

A hymnal of Creation–
A HYMNAL OF CREATION–

forging the world to come
FORGING THE WORLD TO COME.

“Every atom belonging to me,
EVERY ATOM BELONGING TO ME,

As good belongs to you.
AS GOOD BELONGS TO YOU.”

Whitman said that.
WHITMAN SAID THAT.

And he was right.
AND HE WAS RIGHT.

We are partners in creation.
WE ARE PARTNERS IN CREATION

With Creation itself
WITH CREATION ITSELF.

We just said that.
WE JUST SAID THAT.

And we say loud and clear
AND WE SAY LOUD AND CLEAR:

We demand the right
WE DEMAND THE RIGHT

To occupy our lives;
TO OCCUPY OUR LIVES;

To care for our planet-mother;
TO CARE FOR OUR PLANET-MOTHER;

And to care for one another
AND TO CARE FOR ONE ANOTHER.

To nurture the best that is in us,
TO NURTURE THE BEST THAT IS IN US,

And the best that is yet to be
AND THE BEST THAT IS YET TO BE.

We want no Lords and Ladies
WE WANT NO LORDS AND LADIES

Telling us how to live!
TELLING US HOW TO LIVE!

Striving, ever striving,
STRIVING, EVER STRIVING,

To reach for the stars with compassion,
TO REACH FOR THE STARS WITH COMPASSION,

With a song of liberty;
WITH A SONG OF LIBERTY;

Growing in knowledge and wisdom,
GROWING IN KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM,

With hearts that are brave and free
WITH HEARTS THAT ARE BRAVE AND FREE.

Let us be those people!
LET US BE THOSE PEOPLE!

Let us be such people!
LET US BE SUCH PEOPLE!

We are becoming such people!
WE ARE BECOMING SUCH PEOPLE!

Now we are the people!
NOW WE ARE THE PEOPLE!

We, the People!
WE, THE PEOPLE!

We, the People!
WE, THE PEOPLE!

We, the People!
WE, THE PEOPLE!

To confirm Gaddafi’s craziness, Clinton-tell-all-renegade George Stephanapoulos, filling in for the most artfully cadenced voice in Television—Diane—Kissinger-protégé–Sawyer—switches to a tape of Wah-Wah interviewing Gaddafi about 10 years earlier.  Muammar is preening in his robes, and Wah-Wah slurs point blank: “You know, a lot of Americans think you’re crazy!”  And Gaddafi laughs.

“Boy!—that laugh is chilling!” proclaims ever-boyish, perfect hairline, Georgie S.

And that’s about the essence of the insight we’re going to get from the MSM about the Transitional National Council’s public butchering of Libya’s former leader.  That and porcine Hillary Clinton snorting through her snout: “We came, we saw, he died.”  And thus, in a weird nutshell paraphrase of Caesar’s megalomaniacal description of his conquest of Gaul, we see the perverted logic of NATO’s bombing campaign and resources-grab that results in the death of some 50,000 Libyans in order to save perhaps 1000 “rebels” at risk in Benghazi.

One week later, and there is Wah-Wah again in some advertisement for an upcoming series of interviews she will conduct with billionaires!  This is Wah-Wah’s and the MSM’S answer to Occupy Wall Street!  Visit these nice, friendly billionaires at home and show how they’re “just folks”!  And how did they make their billions?  Why, as John Houseman intoned in the old Smith Barney ad—“They made their money the old-fashioned way!  They earned it!”

That’s pretty much the way Herman Cain sees things, too.  Asked a couple of weeks ago about his reaction to OWS, Cain blurts something inane like: “If you’re poor in America, it’s your fault!  Blame yourself!”  (Not exactly Martin Luther King… but, that was then and this is now!)

Well, what other sort of answer would one expect from the Godfather?  And as for Wah-Wah, a woman who brags about her trysts with the likes of war-criminal Henry Kissinger–is that a judge of character anyone can trust?

As for the Godfather…consider this:

Let’s say we have a party, and, feeling small-“d” democratic,” we invite 100 people from all walks of life.  We’re going to “entertain” these people with Lady Gaga’s gyrations and pay her a cool million dollars—the going rate—because “she earns it!”  We’re going to feed our guests with a nice-a, big-a pizza pie, which we’ll cut into 100 equal slices—each slice sufficient to feed one guest.  Problem is, the first person takes 40 slices!  S/he doesn’t “need” 40 slices, but s/he has “earned” it—meaning, they can do whatever they want with it—from creating jobs to throwing it on the pink-flamingo decorated lawn—with the little, black jockey boy statue, holding the lantern!)  Now, the next 4 people get 7 slices each because they “earned it,” too—mostly by doing number two whenever Number One tells them to!  Now, the next 15 people get one slice each.  So these 20 folks are doing okay to totally decadent–they each have at least one slice of delicious pizza to fill their bellies.

But the Godfather—who is transforming right before our eyes into a black, obese but jocular Tony Soprano—can’t understand why the remaining 80 folks are grumbling because they only have 7 slices to divide among themselves!  Mr. Cain, who can barely do the math for his own “9-9-9” scheme, can’t figure out how to feed 80 folks with just 7 slices of pizza.

These, metaphorically, are the sick values of our Mainstream Media, our politicians and our corporate tycoons.  They just don’t get it!  They don’t understand why the young and the old all over America, all over this world, are in rebellion against their perverse ways.

The “Occupy” crowd is beautifully named.  They want to “occupy” their space, their time, their lives.  They—we—do not measure our lives’ worth in terms of the billions of dollars we have never amassed.    We ask: How is money made?  (“Right Livelihood,” we recall, is one of the essential aspects of Buddha’s Noble Eight-fold Path!)  What good has come of the wealth?  (“Lay not up worldly treasures,” the Essene Jesus advised.)  What lives were improved?  How?  Was the planet made more liveable, more beautiful?  We ask: What is the measure of a life worth living; and, yes–what is the meaning of life?

It’s a question as old as Plato and Aristotle, as old as the Hebrew prophets and the Sumerian cuneiform tablets.  It is a much greater question than the question of happiness… because enduring happiness depends on it.

We have been a culture distracted by the baubles of consumption.  We have been willing to kill and maim millions of people, unheroically and stupidly, while just “following orders” or “doing our jobs,” so that an insignificant 1 percent–and even much less than that—could accumulate more and more baubles and dictate more and more orders.

There are four great reasons why the Occupy movement will not go away, why it will grow stronger as we advance into winter and next spring: 1. It is inter-generational.  2. It is international.  3. It is technologized.  4.  It is life-saving and essential.

Greater connections will be formed.  The young will screw each other (in the best sense!) and fall in love; and the white-haired women who run with wolves and the graybeards who danced with Janis J. for peace in the 60s will re-learn the language of the young and impart the rich ore of their own experiences.  And when the snow comes, and the cold appears to drive them away… they will retreat in order to regroup–and fight again come spring.

Because we are connected now…, and talking–all around the world.  And we see each other now, and we ask: “If not us, who?  If not now, when?”

I had my “Citizen Journalist” cap and T-shirt on and I was in the middle of it — in the middle of Times Square — excited and wondering what next… and giddy with a sense of power in numbers and power in the justice of a cause — something I hadn’t felt big-time since the 60s and 70s, and hadn’t felt little-time since the march against starting the war on Iraq (and we all know how that went!), and there he was… standing there listening and observing like everyone else, but giving off these vibes like he was taking it all in, like he’d seen it a million times before in a million different places. And it was good, and, somehow, he was blessing it!

I didn’t recognize him at first, I say. He didn’t look like blue-eyed, brown-haired Jeffrey Hunter in the King of Kings (that I’d seen as a teen), and he didn’t look like the gentle, brown-haired hippie with the white peasant shirt and burnt-sienna robe and the beatific smile; not that guy with the throbbing blood-red Valentine’s heart in the middle of his peasant shirt (that some of my relatives used to hang on their walls).

No! Fact is, he was kind of Semitic looking, with a somewhat aquiline nose, and brown skin, slightly built — kind of a cross between an old-time Jew and a modern-day Palestinian: a 30ish Woody Alan with a bit of Yasser Arafat! He was wearing a nondescript sport jacket, a white shirt, no tie, and laced up old-fashioned sandals.

I approached with some apprehension. “It’s you?” I asked.

He nodded. “You were expecting the Lord of Hosts?”

“What… what are you doing here?”

“So… where else should I be… at a time like this?”

“You’re… you’re one of us? You’re on our side?”

“The question is, to paraphrase Abraham…”

“Sarah’s husband?”

“No! Mary Todd’s! Your Abraham, your Lincoln. … The question is: Are you on my side?”

“I think we are. … I mean, it’s multi-faceted, you know. There’s so many things wrong! It all seems to be culminating now. The environment, the climate, geophysical changes, economic collapse. …”

“It’s a megillah; that’s for sure!”

“The damn MSM… they keep saying, we’ve got to define what we want, you know. They’re bitchin’ and whining: What’s the program? What do the protestors want? But… there are so many things! If we start putting it down on paper — they’re going to get their hired media guns to tear us apart, point by point. They’ll throw money at their hired guns. If some of us get our heads above the crowd, if we speak out and others start listening and nodding their heads—then, the media will anoint them “leaders” and then the hired guns will go after the leaders. So… it’s all of that! That’s what the problem is! It’s the way money works in this world—in the world they’ve created. It’s about money as power! It’s about their raping the planet and then their throwing money around to hire the guns and the soldiers and the media freaks… and the whores and the pimps taking the money and stuffing their faces while the people are eating the scraps left over after the boots have stomped through the fields.”

“Sure, sure; it’s an old story. Look, why do you think I did what I did? You think it was easy? You think I wasn’t scared? You think I wasn’t shaking that time in Gethsemane? I was shaking, I tell you. I was scared! But I couldn’t stand it. … The money-changers… in the Temple! In God’s house! Herod’s eating peacocks’ balls — like his Roman over-lords — and the people are dying of leprosy! We’ve got money for soldiers all over the place, money for tribute but no money for doctors! I couldn’t take it any more! I looked around; I couldn’t take it anymore!”

“You went among the lepers. …”

“I broke bread with them! Just like Buddha! You know the story of Buddha? He broke bread with the lepers, and while they were eating, a leper’s thumb fell off! And Buddha brushed it away, just brushed it away, just kept eating. … You know why? You know why?”

“No.”

“He didn’t want to embarrass the leper! What a mensch! Such a mensch!”

“You admire Buddha?”

“Of course! Courage, humanity, vision! What’s not to like?”

“The MSM, they make it seem like… you guys… like you’re all in your own little worlds. The churches, the temples, the mosques, the shrines, the religious wars—”

“Fuck the MSM! Fuck the religious wars! You got this one little planet! You got this one little marble — and marvel — of a planet! That’s all you’ve got! That’s all you’re going to get! You’ve been raping it for centuries! Raping and pillaging and slaughtering your own kind and every other kind! When will you grow up? When will this idiot human race grow up?”

“That’s what it’s about, you see. That’s what we’re trying to do, why we’re here! We’re trying to grow up! This Globalization thing. … The bankers and the corporations and the speculators and the celebrities — they all wanted it to line their pockets better. Being millionaires wasn’t good enough. They wanted to be billionaires! Being billionaires wasn’t good enough; they wanted to be multi-billionaires! And, meantime, they’re taking more and more from everyone else. They’re plundering and they’re raping and they’re slaughtering and lining their pockets. Eating peacocks’ balls… and lining their pockets! They don’t know when to quit! They don’t know where to draw the line!”

“They never do!”

“And this globalization thing, it was all for their benefit… only… there was another side to it. That’s what we understand now. That we can talk to people on the other side of the world… and they’re just like us! They’re also sick of this crap! They don’t want to kill and die for the top 1 percent — for people who don’t give a damn about them! People who turn them against those who are like them! We’re all in it together! We can understand that now!”

“’Suffer the little children to come unto me,’” I said. I didn’t say, ‘Let only the rich kids come to me.’ That’s the message, you see. Equality! Be as a little child. Believe you can create the world anew. And you will!”

“I think so… I hope so… but…”

He understood. I didn’t have to say anything else. I had never really needed to say anything, but he had let me speak so as to know myself. His eyes were kind, and old, and wise, and a tear coursed down his cheek from one of them. “It’s going to be hard,” he said softly. “The Centurions don’t give up without a fight. The Pharisees and the Sadducees don’t give up without a fight.”

“A kind of crucifixion. … Is that what you mean?”

“In a manner of speaking. One way or another. You’ll have to go through it.”

“And then?”

“And then?” He looked around at the crowd that kept multiplying, multiplying — like the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. “What else?” he said. “You become God-realized! … Resurrection,” he said. “And…, a new beginning.”

He hoisted her a little higher on his back. …

If only Mother had followed Sister’s counsel about the pumice stone—or had allowed Sister to use the stone on her (and to trim her long toenails, as well!)—her calloused heels would not be chafing his ribs and hips through the thin fabric of his summer yukata.

But, she had always been a stubborn, proud woman; and in her youth she had been considered a bijin—a beauty—who had held her head high among the courtesans—the first wife of the Lord’s First Minister, with her own retinue of servants in the apartments near the Daimyo’s own.

But, that was long ago, and he could hardly remember now, as he carried her, like a sack of rice on his back, up the winding hill, this hot and humid and forlorn day.

Crows cawed above, as if in warning. For what? More calamities to come? Could there be any more in these wretched times? Even Nature had turned against the land, with earthquakes and typhoons rattling and lashing the little wooden homes and shrines, scattering them like chopsticks, and even the stone ojizo that guarded the children’s graves—even these small and tender Buddhas were cracked like eggs.

Everything changed when the wars began, and now his childhood seemed a dream he dared not, for the sake of sanity, indulge.

What had his father done to lose his place among the ministers—what errant word or glance, or mis-advice had caused him to lose favor? Hadn’t he chanted the Lotus Sutra every morning and every evening to secure his family’s place in the Pure Land?

Posh! What nonsense! Yorifumi thought now. So much mumbo-jumbo—incantations to the wind!

Crows cawed, and he half-smiled, half-grimaced at the rumors spread in the villages that even the crows were spies now, that they had been trained to see and report transgressions—and special handlers could decode their messages!

He felt his mother stirring on his back, felt her small breath a little cooler on his neck, knew she was awakening again.

“Son, son… why are you taking me up this hill? I know where we are going! Let me rest. Let me pass water, Yori-kun. Do not shame your mother!”

So he put her down in a shady spot on the trail and he turned his eyes away as she crouched, passed water, wiped herself with some leaves.

“Let us go back,” she said softly. “Not up the hill.”

“There is contagion in the village,” he explained again. “The children are dying… and the old people. … It is as I told you. … As we ascend, the air will clear, you can breathe deeply again, and the clean air will purify your lungs and make you well.”

“I am not well with this world, Son. … And with the lies we tell ourselves… and others.”

He looked into the blackness of her eyes, and felt himself falling into a dark and bottomless well. “I cannot rest too long, Mother. Or, I shan’t be able to go on.”

“Rest, then. Rest long.”

He crouched beside her. Gently he said, “Come, Mother. Climb on my back now. My legs are not so strong as they once were. I, too, feel the weight of these sad years. We must do what we must do.”

His legs were strong enough, but his back ached. Decades of bending over to plant the tender rice stalks, decades of pulling carts like a rich man’s ox, had bent his back and tightened the muscles in his legs.

Meekly, like a child, dutifully, as one who has seen better days, his mother climbed on her son’s back. “Oi!” he cried as he straightened as much as he could. Then, one straw zori after the other, he dug into the upward trail.

2.

Once he had dreamt of being a scholar, studying the sacred texts, decoding the mysteries. Now, every nerve and muscle in his 40-year old body strained under the weight, in the heat, as he proceeded steadily, surefootedly, uphill.

He remembered the lessons of his school days–the golden days of Court and castle–before the clans had broken the peace and plunged the world into hell. The crows cawed, and he heard his teacher’s voice in his mind:

“Rising with first light, the common people wash their faces, gargle water, then bow in six directions—east, then west; south, then north; above, and then below. They make obeisance to the six directions, praying that no misfortune will come from them.

“But Lord Buddha taught us how to bow to Truth; and, behaving wisely, and with virtue, that we could thus prevent misfortune.” The Scholar had turned his gentle eyes on him, nodded his glabrous head. “Yori-kun, can you tell the class the difference between the common man’s understanding and Lord Buddha’s teaching?”

He rose, and, in spite of himself, he felt a little pride, for he had thought about the difference all that evening before when he had read the lesson. “It is the same as when the Compassionate One spoke to Ananda, his favorite disciple; when, near dying, he said, ‘Be a lamp unto yourself.’”

“Expatiate, young sir.”

The other students honored him now, honored him with their attention. “The common people,” he continued, “put their faith in rituals—cleansing themselves and bowing to the six directions. … They think strength lies outside of themselves; they hope to placate the gods and demons. … But, the true disciple knows—this world is an illusion. … Fortune and misfortune are two sides of the coin. The discriminating mind is constantly dividing. … But the mind that is enlightened sees the wholeness of the moment—even as it’s passing. That mind perceives the truth of transitoriness. Its strength is its integrity-honed clarity.”

Even the venerable Scholar could not suppress a smile. And he—the fourteen-year old prodigy—wondered where the words had come from. He had never spoken so eloquently before, never thought such thoughts before. The classroom hushed in silence. …

“Yori-kun,” griped his mother now, “I am tired. Let us rest again.”

“Not yet, Mother.”

“Did you bring the mung beans?” she asked him. “Did you bring the onigiri?”

He reached into the pouch at his belt and handed her mung beans and a rice ball filled with dried fish over his shoulder. Soon, she wanted water, so he handed her the gourd at his belt and she gulped twice noisily. She was quiet for a while and he thought she slept, but soon she was murmuring to herself. “I know where we are going. My own son is taking me, my second son, now that my first son has died in the wars.”

“That was long ago, Mother.”

“No…, it was yesterday,” she said. And then she slept.

3.

He had watched his wife wrap the onigiri rice balls with dried seaweed and a little vinegar in the first light of dawn. Neither of them had slept well, knowing what must happen.

“There is no other way,” she had told him yesterday evening. “It has all led up to this… since the edict.”

They had discussed it before, two months earlier, when the edict had been published and the literate men had read it and discussed it, then broken the news to their wives.

“Fumiko is with child,” his wife had said. “It is either grandmother or the baby. Our daughter has had two sons already, one still-born. If she has a girl baby now. …”

She did not need to finish. In adjacent provinces, hunger and starvation had spread like wildfires, parents had begun to smother the girl babies. Now, hunger lurked in the eyes of the watchers in his own village. Their hollow, sallow cheeks reproached the elderly: why do you cling to the tatters of life like withered leaves on a cloven trunk? No one escaped the watchers.

That was the stark choice. … And if not his daughter’s baby girl, then someone else in the village. There was no longer food enough for all, especially since the taxes took so much for war.

That was the essence of the edict they called “Solving the Poor.” He wondered what minister of the Court, what word-mincer, what officious, sycophantic imbecile had dreamed up such a title? Not, “Solving Poverty”—ending the wars and the taxation that took the best of their labors to give it to the courtiers and superfluous ministries, and then to feed the soldiers who no longer worked in the paddies or fished the seas and rivers. “Solving the Poor,” they called it! By destroying them!

He watched the bandy-legged man descend the trail above him. The man’s face was grim, hard-set, his eyes fixed. He thought he recognized him from years before—someone from another village. But the man would not acknowledge him, would not acknowledge anyone. “He and I are the same man,” Yorifumi thought now. “He has done his work already… and I am nearly done.” The man’s rigid expression chilled him.

A cool wind blew through the bamboo copse at the side of the trail, rustling and clicking the tall stalks. When he was a child, his mother had told him, “If an earthquake comes, go to the bamboo copse, for the roots are knitted together there, underneath, where we can’t see them. The earth may crack around the copse, but there the earth is sewn together. There… is safety.”

But no place was safe in the days of the marauders. The soldiers invaded all the refuges. Minamoto or Taira—it did not matter what they called themselves, whether they fought for the Lord of the allied provinces or against them. All the earth quaked under the war horses’ hooves.

Across the western sea, in the land of Ch’in, in ancient times, they had fought four hundred years. … How long would the wars last now, he wondered. …

“Son, I am tired,” his mother murmured. “Let us rest again.”

“We are almost there, Mother. … At the resting place.”

Bamboo could knit their long, green fingers reaching for the sky—but men could not! No bamboo stalk begrudged another’s height or heft… but men made wars for straws.

“Another onigiri,” his mother begged now.

“Soon, Mother, soon.”

He had asked his wife to add a little rice wine and the last of the dried fish they had. He had hoped the wine would make his mother sleepy. And the fish… because it was the last they had!

Now the crows were circling and cawing. He remembered when he had come upon the hanged man in the tree, how the crows had perched on his shoulders, and how they ate the man’s eyes like a jellied delicacy.

The scrawny stranger was a runaway from another village, another province. Now he swung and turned slowly, suspended from a branch of cryptomeria. They learned later that he had murdered his girl baby. And then his wife. And then went mad.

He set his mother down upon the ground. She could barely stand on her spindly legs. He turned her to look at him, away from the precipice. Looking beyond her, he saw the tattered rags of the corpses.

How beautiful she had been in that other world—before the wars, before the devastation! How proud and dignified his father had been before losing favor at the Court, before his seppuku.

And now her hair was gray and patchy, and her skin bronze and leathery.

“Think not that this world is meaningless and filled with confusion,” the Scriptures taught. “Taste the way of Enlightenment in all the affairs of this world.”

She stood at arm’s length from him, sad and frail as a scarecrow. She sniffled and smiled weakly at him, understanding.

He meant to touch her shoulder gently, as he had when he was a boy. He could not do what had been ordained—edicts be damned.

He bowed to her, touched her gently to reassure her, touched her gently as a falling leaf alighting on her shoulder.

But she fell over backwards, tumbling down the ravine, breaking her neck as she fell. The crows swooped up and down in a storm of wings.

His knees buckled under him on the trail, and he hit the hard ground with his bony rump. He heaved for air. Then the floodgates of his tears were opened, and could not be closed.

Part 1. The Vision

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

            (to be chanted until the Spirit is with one)

Where the horses dance like mad on Paha Sapa;
Where the mountains flow like rivers in the sun,
Turning watery golden under the reddening sky;
Where the clouds assume a human, spectral form,
Flowering with faces of the still unborn:
There the Grandfathers of our people called me,
Smiling behind their wild cloud beards.
Their eyes were holes where the sky entered in,
And their hands were the ashes of hands.
Opening their mouths, hawks soared from them,
Fluttering, turning in the glistening air.
A reed they smoked from bade me have no fear.
To each the reed was handed as a friend.

Then the Grandfathers bade me follow.
They grew young before me like boys.
And we hooted and shouted and rode on the wind,
Our hair like black fire behind us.
The hooves of our ponies kissed the sweet prairie grass,
And the air all around us rumbled with storm.
As far as eyes saw, the bison stampeded.
“Hoka-hey!” cried the Grandfathers.
Locusts of arrows rained on the prairie.
“Hoka-hey!” cried the women.
Red meat hung in the cottonwood branches.

Over the Greasy Grass we rode,
Over the tipis of nations:
The fires of the tribes lit up the hills,
The tipis of Minneconjous flapped in the wind.

Oglala and Shyela, Hunkpapa and Lakota,
Santee and Yanktonai camped by the icy stream.
The stars burned bright in the hair of the Great Father.
The blue river ran swiftly past the tribes.

All night the Bear Men dance round the fires,
All night their shadows dance on the tipis
Where the children dream; white smoke drifts in the sky.

Morning, red sun peeks through grey clouds.
Higher and higher, rising in the air,
The horses neigh wildly, the Grandfathers shout,
And the women dance round and round and round, clapping.
Hundreds of bluecoats bloom in their blood
Like hundreds of violets scattered on the hills.

All this I saw before my springs were ten.
And after, many times, flew with the spirits
To the other world, shedding the skin of shadows.
The people showed me honor with their eyes.
Great feasts we had, and battles,
With many victories over our enemies,
The rumbling thunder-beings making the bad ones crazy.

Then we were the first men of the Earth:
The faces of our children shone with morning;
Summer and winter the world was rich with heroes.
But now, all’s past; the hoop of the world lies broken.
Whirlwind and hailstone pummel the prairie.
Hungering dogs howl in the bitter air.
The wandering spirits hide.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

            (let the silence linger)

Part 2. The Hope

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
The sacred buffalo wallows in his grave.
Washita maggots swarm on the prairies.
Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
Tongueless carcasses rot in the red sun.
Human vermin murder holy land.

Now let us moan, my brothers!
The long-wailing coyotes will not out-grieve us.
The prairie dogs will look at us in pity.
All over the Earth the beasts will tell our story.
Gather now in the long grass, ghosts of my people.
Let your heart-felt cries rend heaven!
The Great Spirit weeps and culls us to His bosom.
We must leave this Earth we loved.
Never shall we walk these hills again.

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
The clouds blot out the sun; the morning wanes.
The prairie flowers die while still in bud;
The cries of tortured bison scorch the air.

You saw your children hunted down like dogs,
Your women butchered, whittled into bone.
You could not bear the fire-watered eyes
Of braves who rode against the Long Hair foe.
You walked into the woods and lived alone.

You whom the Spirit loved as His own son,
Whose eyes, they say, held fire in their core,
Who saw the horses dancing in the clouds,
Who danced above the rattling Gatling guns–
Now you are gone; no more will you walk before us,
And the long night of our land comes on.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

Part 3. The Sabers

The bluecoat sabers come! The thunderous drum
Of horses beats the plains!
The wagon guns are coughing at the hills!
Look! It is just meat here which had a name.
The lips that kissed a lover’s kiss the flies.
The innocent die with music,
Cruel music of the Gatling guns,
While snow shuts closed forever mouths that sang to God.

O, Sun that endures forever, men must die!
O, Earth that endures forever, men must die!
Great Spirit, spread Your wings above us,
Hover, Falcon, over Your lost children.

The snow falls in the valley of our graves.
Bones stiffen; dumb mouths sing with wind.
The long night of our land comes on.

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
At night, in the disemboweled bodies of horses,
Of bison, you slept in howling caves
While bluecoats fell with the snow.

Never would you be free again.
Never would you walk above the clouds.
Staring at embers with your brittle eyes,
You saw the bison skeletons stampede.
Dancing, you fell; dreaming, you could not rise.
At last, your own tears froze you to the ground.

O, Sun that endures forever, men must die!
O, Earth that endures forever, men must die!
The innocent die with music, cruel music,
And the long night of our land comes on.

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
Cuffed and shackled, a beast with human eyes–
They shoved you to the prison door, they beat you down.
You watched them throw raw beef
To chiefs who ate off floors.

The vision gnawed; you reeled and cried;
You danced and groaned;
The hot steel flashed inside of you;
You fell like empty sackcloth to the ground.

Which of them knew you, warrior, spirit–
Raging with politics, God, greed and guns?
Which of them saw the poet inside you,
Brutal and lusting, with their teeth full of gold?
The old chiefs wept, and sang,
And shook their heads, remembering, when told.
The sky fell down and cracked the shoulders of the young.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

Part 4. The Song

A man who lived beneath the hot sun’s thumb
Said that if we danced the rains would come
And white men would grow small and drown.
In every tribe we heard the throbbing drum
And saw men dance until their feet were numb,
And heard the crackle of the white man’s gun.

Now let us make the long march home, my brothers.
The river is frozen with the blood of our warriors.
Our chiefs are slain, our daughters have the eyes
Of old women, our sons have forgotten who we were.

While the twilight comes, pull down the tipi poles!
Let the ponies step quietly
Over the puddles of the moonlit snow.
Let the infants make no crying in their nested sleep.
Only the prairie wind will be talking.
Let each one linger in his thoughts.

Great Spirit of the Wind and Waters,
Thunder and roses dwell within Your arms!
We have heard the prairie groan beneath the iron rail.
We have seen the engine streak the clear blue sky.
Buffalo is gone, and, now, we, too, must go.

Let the prairie dogs trace our footsteps.
Never again will Earth be young for us,
Never again hold out her warm, green arms.
Never again will Sky throw back his head
And laugh until the stars are shaken down.
Men’s lives are warm breath mingled with the cold.
Men’s lives are footsteps in the snow.

Now let us make the long march home, my brothers.
Never shall we find rest among these mountains.
Our Great Grandmother waits in the Valley of Skulls.
Only she will embrace us hereafter.
Never shall we roam from her again.
With her only shall we find peace.

Now brothers, do not weep;
Your tears will never melt the snow.
Now ponies, step quietly through this dark land.
The branches of the saplings hold the moon
As in a spider’s silvery web.
Our Grandfather’s chant to us beyond this snow.
Listen… listen… listen… listen. …
See where the moon spills from the trees on them?
O, they are white upon the whiteness of the snow.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

(“The Song of the Hoop” won the Stephen Vincent Benet Narrative Poem Prize in 1972. It was published in Poet Lore in 1973.)

Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars
That make ambition virtue!”

— William Shakespeare, Othello

It would be supererogatory for me to list those areas in which thoughtful Americans feel that collapse is coming.

— Anthony Burgess, “Is America Falling Apart?” (1971)

Hard times for the Global Empire: a roasting hot summer of shame in U.S. politics and economics—and America’s worst military defeat in Afghanistan—38 men in a Chinook shot down, following hard on the heels of our greatest War-on-Terror “triumph”—the assassination of an old guy in Pakistan, MSM-reputed to be, Bin Laden.

We stare at the unraveling mise en scene as at an enveloping blaze caused by a sudden downdraft in a fireplace—a blaze we thought contained– now a whoosh! rippling over our heads. Yet, if we are honest, we conclude: this “collapse” has been like a venereal disease with which we’ve maintained an uneasy armistice; and now it flares, like a cancerous memory.

Some forty years ago, one of Britain’s best modern authors, Anthony Burgess, taught for a while in an America that was napalming and agent-oranging its way through Vietnam; a nation in which racial tensions still threatened to explode into race wars; a nation with the highest murder and incarceration rates in the “developed” world. Yet, in spite of all its defects, Burgess concluded that America’s basic optimism about its future — and even its missionary vision to transform the world into American-style democracies — could, just possibly, with a lot of hard-learned lessons, lead the human race to greener pastures. With luck and pluck, with its bursting drive and energy… America, and the human species, just might make it!

But, not even the author of A Clockwork Orange could foresee the astonishing changes ahead. Forty years on, our luck and pluck have fizzled and our vision suffers from macular degeneration.

Not just in the epicenter of the Anglo-American-Zionist Empire that has dominated the world since the mid 1940s, but in “the limbs and outward flourishes” — farewell content(ment)! In London, the predecessor epicenter of global power, riotous youth burn up blocks of real estate and trash police cars. PM Cameron rushes home from vacation in Berlus-cannoli’s media entity, formerly known as Italy (or povera Italia, as they say in rat-infested Napoli). “Thuggery!” the Murdochian politicans and pundits declaim. And, no doubt, there is much of it. … But from whence comes thuggery and hooliganism? From what failures of the State to educate and to employ the young? From what anomie of mindless TV, video, movie and game fare does rage finally erupt? From what insane immigration policies and forced “multiculturalism”? From what social and economic roots do these boughs of discord burgeon?

And do the denunciators know how much they echo those who opposed the uprisings in Tahrir Square last spring, or in Hama, Syria this summer? What kind of revolution, what year of global discontent must we bear witness to now? And how do we participate? In these coveted and coveting “democracies” are the citizens heard, or herded?

In Israel itself — the source of so much pain and confusion since it was hacked from the British mandate of Palestine back in the 40s — hundreds of thousands of youths,mostly Jews, and a fair number of Arabs, gather in tents and in the streets to kavetch, to share food, information, and experiences in that garrisoned State, that walled-in entity of permanent-war and exclusion.

In Washington, D.C., the impersonating imperators in Congress and the White House, along with the punditocracy that endlessly interprets and explains nothing, stumble over one another in their eagerness to blame the other guy, and, after weeks of vowing they will not “kick the can down the road”… kick the can down the spaghetti junction, losing our S&P triple-A credit rating. Would you buy a used car from this country? Would you buy a new one? Can you afford to buy bread?

Amidst a swelling chorus of asininities during these preventable debacles, these remarks from the junior freshman senator from the hot and arid, formerly lush and green, great state of Florida may take first prize in the comedy category on America’s Got Talent.

For those without 2 and 1/2 minutes to deliquesce on the thoroughly risible, I summarize: Junior Senator is lambasting Prez O because in his little pep talk announcing a “deal” had been struck (between the competing bad plans) to avert the US from defaulting on its debts, POTUS had again mentioned the need to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires—even having the chutzpah to urge a tax on the owners of corporate jets! This, according to Senator Marco Rubio, is nothing short of “class warfare.” And, the senator is alarmed because “America does not have a tradition of class warfare.”

To which the only informed response is: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

The American Republic-Empire has stunningly advanced the “tradition of class warfare” from its inception. That warfare has taken various forms, and has often been subsumed into other kinds of warfare, such as racial wars against “Indians,”—stalwartly defending their own inherent rights to “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. This country built its wealth upon the labor of the lowest classes of indentured servants pouring in from over-populated Europe, and upon the “class-less” Black slaves. In the slave-owning Jeffersonian system, men may be “created equal”, but they soon learn their places in the “aristocracy of talents”.

Marx made a pretty good case for our heroic Civil War being, in fact, a class war between the interests of the Northern industrial aristocracy and the Southern planter aristocracy, concerning which elite would control the “peasants” — blacks and whites — as the Empire expanded into the newly conquered Mexican territory and south to the Caribbean!

When America’s laboring classes began to organize in the late 19th Century and throughout the 1930s, they were met with the “thuggery” of Pinkerton goons hired by railroad barons, steel barons, and sundry other sherbert-eaters from the baronial estates! In the 1950s, when Hollywood dared to be a little progressive, when true artists tried to uncover the real causes of depression and war—within the very nature of our class system—those artists were hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), black-listed, drum-rolled out of their employment or their country! (John Garfield was but one notable example, knouted for having the integrity not to “name names.”)

When Reagan fired the nation’s air-traffic controllers over a pay dispute, he aligned national and corporate power against union and labor power—and that was class warfare!

When the Wisconsin legislature recently stripped collective bargaining rights from public employees—teachers, firemen, etc. and Governor Scott Walker called out the National Guard to quell the protests over the action—that was class warfare!

When school budgets are cut, but cuts in the taxes of owners of corporate jets are sustained—that is class warfare!

When Dr. Sue Rabbitt Roff, senior research fellow with the Dundee University Medical School in Scotland, writing for the UK’s most prestigious medical journal, suggests that youth can pay for their student debts of 20-30,000 pounds (32-48,000 dollars) by selling their spare kidneys to the wealthy who can pay for them and need them—what the hell is that but class warfare?

Or, perhaps we need another name for all of this. Forget the “cl.” Let’s just call it “Ass Warfare”—the idea that one person’s ass is worth boatloads more lucre than another’s! (Perhaps in the near future, callipygian co-eds will be urged to sell their “assets” to matronly millionairesses who have fallen behind!)

Ass Warfare. … It has been going on since the founding of this Republic-Empire. It was there in Athens’ Delian League, and in the land of the pharaohs, and in King David’s little imperium. But it has never been as bad as now because there are 7 billion of us on a crowded planet, running out of food, water and other life essentials and a growing, restless majority of us don’t want to take this crap any more!

How high’s the water, mama?
It’s five feet high and risin’

Water rising into a tsunami in some parts of this embattled and entangled earth, and parching the land with its cry of absence in Somalia and the soon-to-be 7th largest desert on the planet — Texas.

This embattled, entangled—and connected!—fragile, agate stone of a planet!

Is there any hope—that last curse in Pandora’s box that makes us bear all the others? Haven’t we crossed the tipping point? Scientists like James Hansen, alerting the world to our growing, choking CO2 emissions have argued for years that we are dangerously near—or over it!

Forty years ago, Burgess dissected our problems thus:

American individualism, on the face of it an admirable philosophy, wishes to manifest itself in independence of the community. You don’t share things in common; you have your own things. A family’s strength is signalized by its possessions. Herein lies a paradox. For the desire for possessions must eventually mean dependence on possessions. Freedom is slavery.

Burgess probably knew he was citing Orwell in that last sentence, and certainly Huxley and Orwell are the two great prophets of our New Feudalism. Another prophet was Einstein, who wrote, “A new kind of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.”

And how do we develop that out-of-the-box thinking? Both Burgess and Einstein found some hope in the arts: “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination,” the great Imagineer wrote. “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” And Burgess echoes him here: “The guides, as always lie among the writers and artists.” Especially, he thought, in literature, “that most directly human of the arts.”

And so it might have been some forty years ago had we had a forward-looking ethos, based on the preservation of our highest values—to “encircle the world” with a spirit of cooperation and empathy, an all-in-the-same-boat spirit, rather than an everyone-for-him/herself spirit of acquisition, accumulation, possession and possessiveness, hegemony and exclusion.

Writing in the same year of Burgess’s essay, Saul Bellow wrote:

A powerful nation of unparalleled energy and practicality created an industrial society without precedent in history. The accompanying ugliness, boredom and spiritual trouble are also without precedent. It is essential (as Edgar Wind remarks in Art and Anarchy) that the whole should be less mad than the parts. But Authority has neither the imagination nor the moral capacity to act for the whole.

Forty years on, and Authority is even less imaginative and the cauldron of “spiritual trouble” is boiling over. Various scientists and trends analysts can make pretty good predictions, but there’s always the black swan or the white buffalo. We try to find safe harbor, but the whirlpool is widening and the winds are howling.

Our obligation—to ourselves, friends, loved ones and to future generations—is to be as informed as possible, and to act upon our informed convictions.

We are past the tipping point, which means that horrendous consequences of our folly and neglect are now unavoidable. If London can burn, so can New York.

Millions are at risk of starvation in Somalia and elsewhere because of wars that were never inevitable… except as we believe human stupidity, greed and lack of foresight are inevitable.

TEPCO has not addressed the problems that led to the Fukushima nuclear meltdown disaster—any more than BP has addressed the problems that led to the Gulf Oil spill.

Our Congress has displayed its infantilism to the world regarding the debt default debate… and now 1/5 of our Congress is spending 8 days of their 5-week “vacation” in Israel!

NATO, established to counter the Warsaw Pact nations (or to provoke them!) is now at war in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan—and the Warsaw Pact is long gone.

Bin Laden is also gone—and most likely “long gone” since dying of renal failure in the early 2000s. Yet we waste our men and women and treasure fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. … Wasn’t the aim was to defeat Al Qaeda? Even the corrupt Karzai regime recommends some kind of settlement with the Taliban. How many more helicopters of men must we lose, how many more Afghan and Iraqi and Libyan and Palestinian and Pakistani civilians must we kill and maim and torture in our Ass Wars which we cannot win?

The US now has 43 million people surviving on food stamps—the highest number ever.

We’re on a tinderbox, and various human or natural “matches” could set it off!

It’s happening. All part of a grand cycle, perhaps—Mayan, Hindu, apocalyptic, genetically determined, solar-flare related… God knows what! We’ll find ourselves back in the 60s—only more so now. It will be a global realignment of power structures and power relationships and basic values. Youth will be joined by seniors. The middle classes will align with the poor (and also against the poor!). Much chaos, confusion, liberation and repression. It will be exciting… and tragic. A testing time for the species.

The Chinese curse—“May you live in interesting times”—will be on us.

We must be very alert and apprehensive, stay informed, and, if we are courageous, act on our highest convictions.

One of the worst crimes of the Global Empire—the Propaganda State—these past forty years has been the dereliction of education: the debasement of this fundamental responsibility of seniors towards the young, this bedrock of democracy. When I was a grad student, some 40 years ago, it was well known that a degree in Education was one of the easiest to obtain and, once obtained, would assure a life of genteel or proximate poverty. In spite of the obstacles and the disrespect accorded the profession, dedicated reformers who cared about posterity, and those who loved knowledge and wisdom for their own sake, took on the challenges. But our deleterious “System” has gravely wounded the best of themwith standardized testing, “No Child Left Behind,” over-crowded classrooms, expurgated textbooks, the intrusion of religion into the domain of science, literature, etc.

Here in the great state of Georgia, where I live now, we have attained some notoriety because of a “cheating scandal” in our schools. The cheating was not the mis-deeds of students, but of teachers and administrators who changed exam answers and test scores so that their schools and districts could achieve superior results on nationwide, standardized tests. And, with those results, advancement in the “profession” was more attainable.

“Rectify the names!” It is the cri de coeur of the Age.

Of all the words that Christ hates the most, that he utters with most disdain, is the word “Hypocrite!”

We claim to honor our prophet, Martin Luther King, but we scorn his pacifist principles with every predator drone lobbed on a village or wedding party in Pakistan!

We claim to hate war, but we glorify our “fallen heroes.” We berated the German general staff for “just following orders,” but praised our own guys for “just doing their jobs.” That’s no longer enough, though. Now we are assured—by friends and family and fellow operatives—that the men shot down in the Chinook “really enjoyed” what they were doing! This, I suppose, is supposed to mitigate their deaths—and what they do?

Our soldiers are “heroes,” but what about good teachers, or any hard-working professional or laboring man or woman struggling to deal honestly with neighbors and strangers, and bring up the kids with humane values?

Confucius was asked if there was a signal principle upon which to base a good and moral life—a kind of compass for the winding paths, the treacherous ups and downs. “We must rectify the names,” he replied. Call it as it truly is. Unmask the wizard behind the curtain; the fools in Congress; the predatory transnational banksters; the media murdochians; the Moloch and Mammon-loving co-opted “artists”; mis-educators; and all the myrmidons of a decadent, moribund, parasitic System.

The challenges have never been greater. But… the awareness of the challenges is growing exponentially in our connected world. Farewell content! The wars have come home!

We, on the other hand, are full of “life!”
We eat pizza and watch television.
Water magically appears at our fingers.
Our skin is bathed in emollients.
Our babies are full-throated and fat.
Our bodies are soft, and shaped like gourds.
We drive everywhere in S.U.V.’s.
We vote for politicians who despise us.
We are proud of our democracy.

The people of Somalia vote with their feet.
They trudge the hot sands, looking for water.
The soles of their feet are hard as tires.
They know nothing of Global Warming,
Population over-shoot, Earth’s carrying capacity.
Their carrying capacity
Is a baby on each raw hip.

The poor among us are deliberately poor.
Anyone with gumption can make a million.
Our hard times will pass and we’ll get back to normal:
Proms and Christmases, first kisses,
Change we can believe in, reality TV.
We’ll die and we’ll kill for inalienable rights:
Happy Meals, water at our fingers;
Our right to be oblivious; our right to
Life, liberty and a perennial mirage.

It’s a nice distinction often adduced
To show a finely-calibrated mind
(He’d taught himself Euclid’s geometry);

Still, one wonders if in those dark moods
The 16^th President was prone to suffer—
If he wondered whether there was any side at all;
If it didn’t boil down to
Fighting over semantic differences—
“Property rights” in a land appropriated
From people who never thought they owned the land.

Wage slaves in the North, Black slaves in the South
And the bulwark of the Idea
Pulsing madly West and South,
After the gold at Sutter’s Mill,
After Caribbean sugar,
Both sides seeking to enforce their will
On “savages,” “redskins,” “heathen,” “darkies.”

This is not to argue
There’s no right or wrong;
Beyond those moral apperceptions
That make us either this or that,
We find a universe of constant flux
Under a palette of exploding stars.

God, then, so far beyond
“Our poor powers to add or detract,”
Even the word “ineffable” won’t do
(Implying we might get there some day!).

The New Critics were right to bemoan the flaccid criticism in newspapers and women’s mags, but, as sometimes happens with rebels, they went overboard: throwing out baby with the bath-water and lopping off too many heads.

I reflected on these ideas as I read Morris Berman’s first book of poems.  Counting Blessings is a volume of 44 pages with some excellent poems.  Try as I might, feasting on heaping dishes of Structuralism and Deconstructionism, I cannot read Berman’s initiatory dance with the Muse… and quite forget his impressive background, his intellectual creds, who the man is and what he has done.

I know Berman principally through his book, Dark Ages America.  Published in 2006, it’s a rueful song about the closing of the American mind and heart.  It hurts because it’s the story of lost love—the lost love of a culture, of what might have been.  Sometimes, it’s even funny—the way George Carlin or Richard Pryor or Lenny Bruce could be funny—making you cry and laugh at life’s beautiful-tragic poignancies.

But Berman’s not just a witty heart-yanker.  He’s an acute observor and astute commentator.  In 2000, Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review.  He has been a Professor of Sociology at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and a Professor in Humanities at the Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico City.  Counting Blessings was written after he moved to a small Mexican town a few years back.

His themes are exile, isolation, alienation and reconstitution.  I don’t mean “reconciliation” by the last because there are some things to which we can never quite reconcile: the death of loved ones; getting old—and getting too old; the loss of a culture which nourished even as it destroyed.  So the book is about “reconstituting” oneself, becoming a new person in one’s old skin, acclimating to a very different world in Mexico while remembering—reconstituting—the past:

By what miracle did I shed the old life
the life of autistic hostility
and emerge, reborn, in a new place, a new time?

Thus Berman inquires of himself—and the Universe—in the first poem, “Identity.”

His eye for detail and close observation (and his penchant for irony) are nicely measured in “Last Rites”:

A complicated, delicate insect
crawling along the edge of a pot in my garden
delicate feelers, large green eyes
absorbed in what it was doing.
I can do that, once in a while:
three seconds every month, perhaps.

In “Light,” this hard-headed social historian recalls his mother’s vision of “a burning bush… just like in the bible.”  And, laying his cards on the table, this exemplary rationalist reveals:

I recall a number of incidents like that in my own life,
some more ‘cosmic’ than others.

And,

… around age sixty, perhaps a little before,
I saw a pillar of fire—again, as in the bible
and I began to weep.
This time it stuck:
I see it more or less every day now.
Exodus says it guided the Jews through the desert,
but I’m not looking for the Promised Land.
Oh no—
wandering in the desert is the Promised Land.

That’s a fine last line: a bit of cognitive dissonance serving the lie to the Corporate State that bids us tweet back perfect answers to complex questions at the end of the workday—which, more often these days, never seems to end.  It’s also a line and a poem likely to drive the psychiatrists and the pharmaceuticalists stark mad.  In fact, it turns our whole get-it-do-it-now culture on its noggin.  Acceptance… waiting… wandering. …

At his best, in his conversational style, Berman’s insights can be sharp, startling and true:

Letting go of love
when you have no choice
is a little like dying without morphine.
And then you realize—though you knew it before, of course—
that the closeness was not about sex
but about being able to take care of someone
without a thought for yourself.

Of course, first-book poets, especially one of Berman’s intellectual stature, may be allowed some latitude to stretch their muscles and to fall.  Ultimately, poets are judged by their best; Keats’ revision of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” for example, falls short of his original (and everyone but Keats seems to have agreed on that).  So, in truth, sometimes, Berman’s “conversation” sounds flat:

The pain of knowing what life could be like
and not having it
is a difficult one to endure.

‘Everything in moderation,’ said the ancient Greeks.

Or,

The death instinct hovers over the United States,’
wrote some journalist a few years back.
It was a bad book with one good idea.
and I think: How did this happen?

Poetry wants the “best words in the best order” in Coleridge’s phrase.  Bald statements like this one need some poetic flourish, some juice:

It’s no use, finally;
We simply have to find a different way to live.

All in all, there is wisdom in Berman’s first collection and much that touches us.  I hope to read the poems of this astute sextagenerian expat for decades to come.   Many of us want to put this sad, violent, hyped-up, exploited and exploiting culture behind us.  Berman is one of those who has pointed, and is pointing, a way:

Hard to get up, get ready for the Creation,
when you know what the next few decades are going to be like.
Not any of us have a choice.
Me, I had to be extracted with forceps.
And yet, I’m in no hurry to return…

There’s so much sweetness in a single day
a single woman
a single hummingbird
a single fountain pen
a single poem.

Is there a common thread to these statements? Each writer/thinker/orator is training a highly honed mind upon some of the profoundest concepts of our frail human intellect and imagination: liberty; truth and lying; morality and sin. Each brief statement is a flourishing note—the memorable, essential solo arpeggio in the midst of the orchestral performance. But… beyond the particular insight or theme, each author shares a certain quality of mind—the ability to probe deeper, to turn the mundane or jejune or vapid idea on its head: to look within the essence of the question and oneself… to rotate the squares of the Rubik’s Cube till one gets just the right fit.

Now consider this statement by Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court’s recent decision to nullify the state of California’s ban on selling “gory” videos to minors:

“Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed. As her just desserts for trying to poison Snow White, the wicked queen is made to dance in red hot slippers ‘till she fell dead on the floor.”

What’s missing?

Well, as Wordswoth once responded to a noisome fellow who claimed he could write as well as he—if only he had a mind to: “It is clear that the only thing missing is the mind.”

It is not just that Justice Scalia is making a false analogy, comparing apples and eggs—two very different media—the interactive, sensory-flooding world of “Mortal Kombat,” for example, with the word-by-word, progressive-sequential approach of the literate world… but, also, he seems to have missed a key point. Snow White—and not even an “avatar” of Snow White—is not the agent of the wicked queen’s demise. The queen’s wretched end is a consequence of her violation of higher moral codes—and the ultimate “enforcer” is not some kid with a joystick, but… fate.

Perhaps it is wrong to expect a higher level of thought from our Supreme Court justices? After all, they are not charged with upholding wisdom; merely with the far-easier task of upholding our Constitution—with all its faults.

And just what is this “Constitution,” this “living” document? Reading it, we wander around labyrinths of legalese with various elite interests—slave state vs. commercial; agrarian vs nascent manufacturing—until we come to the fairly clear Bill of Rights.

Except, we’re still trying to figure out “Freedom of Speech”… and, God knows, the Second Amendment is as wide open as Jared Loughner’s surreal gaze. The Constitution is not exactly William Blake’s territory: “Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.” More like Butler’s: “We are not required to know the truth, but to speak it, and so with justice.” And in this murky world of truth, half-truths, falsehoods and confusion, the “eternal vigilance” of which Phillips reminds us is the “price of liberty.” And, that vigilance, that review and interpretation is not, ultimately, the province of Supreme Court justices, but is, inviolably, ours—i.e., We the People’s.

Three times in the past 18 months our Supreme Corporate Court has expressed contempt for We the People and elevated the rights and privileges of a select few above the increasingly disenfranchised many. The “prejudice” of these Supremes was clearly manifested in January, 2010 when, according to the New York Times, the Court “ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections. … The 5-4 decision was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle—that the government has no business regulating political speech.” On the other hand, “the dissenters said that allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace would corrupt democracy.”

Now here’s where things get murky. Nowhere in the Constitution are corporations mentioned. Not until 1819 does the Supreme Court recognize corporations as having some of the “contractual rights” of “persons.” But, while the “rights” of corporations have expanded exponentially in the past couple of centuries, the rights of the People have been abridged. Money, after all, is a marvelous lubricator of “political speech.” While the Court has been telling the wealthy “Full speed ahead,” some 45 million Americans have been getting by on food stamps, and several million more are too worried about their jobs and/or foreclosures to help bankroll local or national candidates. The First Amendment is about Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Expression. It has nothing to do with permitting corporate financial power to overwhelm the free speech of the people—to drown out their voices. Here we are in Mark Twain territory: “You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise, you are nearly sure to get caught.”

The two other instances of Supreme Court-Constitutional perfidies came lickety-split in June, 2011. First the Court decided that 1.5 million female employees of Walmart could not exercise their First Amendment right of Free Speech by uniting in a class-action suit against their alleged gender-biased employer—that global corporation that has helped to finance thousands of factories and sweatshops around the world and driven down wages in the homeland. Again, one thinks of Samuel Butler: “Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.” Cannibalizing the working class is fine and dandy, the fat cats caterwaul, but the tasty morsels would be gauche to complain!

Perhaps these salivating cats have not read the First Amendment carefully or they would have understood that the right to petition for governmental redress of grievances also comes within its purview. And, one wonders: if corporations have expanded their rights as persons and have increasingly assumed quasi-governmental powers—often writing legislation through their lobbyists—haven’t We the People the right to petition corporations and our government for a redress of grievances?

The third wave of these judicial outrages came just in time for the 4th of July celebrations of our freedoms! In another 5-4 decision, with Don Scalia writing the majority opinion, the Court effectively told California’s parents they could go screw themselves. (But not in public!)

On John Stewart’s show the other night, I caught a sample of the kind of videos California’s parents did not want sold to their children: an attractive blond in a skin-tight wet-suit was literally being torn apart by two hulking males on either side of her, pulling on her limbs like a chicken’s wishing bone. Guts, blood and gore spill out of the cracked carcass.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that the Court honored the First Amendment Right of Expression of the multi-billion dollar video-“game” industry over the First Amendment Right of millions of Californians to express their opprobrium. (And these citizens, one should note, were not insisting on censorship—they wanted regulation: under the same principles that we regulate the sale of alcohol, tobacco or firearms to minors, or restrict their access to potentially dangerous motor vehicles.) Wise justices might have recalled Ben Franklin: “Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden, it is forbidden because it is hurtful.”

Probably it is too much to hope, in the majority of these “Justices,” for the quality of mind that can penetrate the great mysteries of life, truth, and morality—not to mention justice and law!. We hope for wisdom and the understanding of great hearts, and we are met with the Wall of the Law. About one hundred and fifty years ago, Chief Seattle of the Duwamish tribe, perceived our fatal dichotomies all too well:

He gave you laws. … Your religion was written upon tables of stone by the iron finger of your God. … Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors—the dreams of our old men… and it is written in the hearts of our people. … Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend with friend cannot be exempt from the common destiny.

Characters:

Antonio Scalia (aka “Big Tony” — BT)

Clarence Thomas (aka “Little Bell” — LB)

Scene: Big Tony has pulled Little Bell aside in the parlor of a Georgetown apartment.

BT: I thought we needed to have this chat about this upcoming Walmart case.

LB: Yazzah. …

BT: You see, essentially what we’ve got here is a bunch of hysterical women trying to bring down one of America’s iconic institutions.

LB: Yazzah. … That’s how I sees it.

BT: Well, you see, there’s this whole principle at stake here. (Putting his hand avuncularly on LB’s shoulder–) Little Bell, if this goes through. … I call it “collective redress,” you see. Well… it’s as dangerous as the notion of “collective bargaining,” you see. These women are trying to work the courts, I’m telling you. They’ll bring down the System, I’m telling you. They’ll bring down the whole fucken System!

LB: Yazzah. That’s right. That’s how I sees it.

BT: Marone! Can you imagine? Why, if we allowed them to do this… we’d have anarchy, I’m telling you. Soon we’d have the Hispanics… and they’d be organizing and they’d be suing the whole fucken government to get Texas back! Give it back to Mexico! Hell, man, we’d have the Injuns organizing and they’d want Massachusetts back—and all the rest of it! Why, we’d have your Black brothers organizing—some hothead young radical who hasn’t been co-opted yet, some little sperm cell that didn’t get washed out with the douche bag, and he’d be out there radicalizing the unemployed. … You know what he’d say, doncha?

LB: Nossah. …

BT: Why, he’d tell’em they had a right, that’s what he’d say… that they had a “Constitutional right” (!) to file a grievance against the whole goddamn government, that’s what he’d say. A collective action… a class-action case against the whole goddamn government, Clarence! The whole goddamn government!

LB: Yazzah. That’s what he’d say. I do believe it!

BT: And they’d listen, Clarence. They’d listen! An’ you know why?

LB: Nossah. …

BT: Because we’d of set the precedent, that’s why! With this goddamn Walmart case. … So, you see, Li’l Bell, that’s why we can’t do it. We just can’t do it!

LB: Yazzah. I sees it now.

BT: (A little calmer now–) Okay, so the Jew and the skirts will throw a fit…, who cares?

LB: Which Jew, Sah?

BT: Breyer, of course! Talk about a guy who’s living in the past, huh? He thinks it’s still the old days with Jews marching arm-in-arm with the colored folks at the NAACP!

LB: (Smiling–) Yazzah! Them were the days!

BT: Okay for them days, I guess, but Breyer’s gotta get with the program! I mean… ideas like a class-action suit against grievances…? What kind of grievances? How they gonna prove it? So…, a skirt doesn’t advance up the ladder of success like a guy does. Does that mean it’s a policy? I mean, what if the Palestinians got hold of such a notion, huh? I mean, where would we be? Where would it end?

LB: Yazzah. … I sees that.

BT: Do you know where we’d be?

LB: (Hesitantly–) Nossah.

BT: Up shit’s creek, that’s where we’d be! I mean the whole damn Empire, that’s where we’d be! The whole good-Jesus N.W.O.! (Suddenly cautious–) None of this is going past us, right LB? I mean. …

LB: Nossah! (Solemnly; raising his right hand–) On my word of honor!

BT: I mean… it would be like the Nixon tapes, fer god’sake. I mean, if it were to get out.

LB: Yazzah.

BT: I mean, it would be like that goddamn Ellsberg, ya know.

LB: Yazzah. That’s right. Like that goddamn Ellsberg.

BT: (Looking around; still suspicious–) What the hell is that on the wall?

LB: Huh?

BT: Over there? What is that? (As he approaches, the robot fly buzzes away, lands nearby.) Goddamn fly! You see that? Goddamn fly! What kind of maid service they got in this place? Huh? The whole country’s falling apart and a bunch of hysterical women want to sue Walmart!

LB: (Shaking his head–) It’s bad! No measure! The folks has no measure no more!

BT: Well…, we’ll have the Jew and the skirts putting up a fuss, but we’ll just get Gwen Ifill or someone in the media to say something about the “liberals” on the court and then the American people will go back to sleep. They’ll stop paying attention soon as they hear that word. They’ve been conditioned now.

LB: Yazzah, that’s the word! (Hits his thigh–) “Conditioned!” (Laughs.)

BT: (Avuncularly again–) And, of course, that hybrid in the White House—he won’t say anything. He’s smart. He knows his place. He’ll keep his mouth shut. He can talk about marching on the picket lines when he’s a candidate, when he’s campaigning, but… he knows how the game is played. He’ll send Michelle off to Africa or something like that. Set her up with a meeting with Mandella an’ all the boobs will say, “See, they’re such good people! They really care!”

LB: (Laughing–) They really care! That’s a good one!

BT: Well, I’m glad we had this little talk, LB. I feel better now, knowing I can count on you!

LB: (Serious again–) Yazzah!

BT: Oh, yeah, there’s something else on the docket. Something about environmental groups being able to sue power companies that release too many emissions. (Starts laughing–) Can you imagine!

LB: (Laughing–) Nossah!

BT: Well, they know where they can stuff that case, right, LB?

LB: Yazzah! Stuff it!

BT: So…, how’s the little missus, LB? She treating you good?

LB: Yazzah! She’s a good one. Long as she keeps her mouth shut when she shouldn’t be pokin’ her nose where it don’t belong! But, I keeps her quiet now.

BT: That’s good, LB. That’s good. Wish the skirts would mind their lessons! They just don’t know what we’re up against. Crazy people want to bring down the whole System, the whole kit-n-kaboodle that we built up over the thousands of years! The whole financial system! The IMF…, and the World Bank…, and the central banks…, and the Rothschilds…, and the corporations…, and the nation-states with their sham democracies that hold it all together… the religious institutions… the kings and queens… the whole goddamn mother-fucking System! Like it was nothin’!

LB: The whole kit-n-kaboodle!

BT: Well, we’re not gonna let’em! We’re not gonna let’em do it, by God! No, sir! We don’t have this beautiful military-surveillance System for nothing, by God! We ain’t gonna let’em do it!

LB: Nossah! Tha’s right! Not gonna let’em! Not gonna let’em bring down the whole kit-n-kaboodle!. … Nossah. … Nossah. … Nossah. …

Yo! A-man! Evie? Where U at?—G-D

Behind the bushes, Big Guy!—E.

What the? U hiding?—G-D

We’re naked, Lord!—A.

Whoa! Who tole u u were naked?—G-D

Duh! I thought u knew everything?—E.

Enuf wid u! Who tole u?—G-D

The serpent bid me eat of the Tree of Knowledge!—E.

An u listened to that reptile scumbag? Not to Me?—G-D

She made me do it, Lord! Don’t smite me!—A

Adam, u twirp!—E

What have U wrought, Lord?—A

OK! That does it! Outa here! Hit the road!—G-D

What a Schlimazel!—E.

I saw that!—G-D

Where do we go, Lord?—A

Follow the Yellow Brick Rd, jerk-off!—G-D

She made me do it!—A.

Kiss-off! Both of you’s! Don’t let the primrose door bump ur ass!–G-D

Please forgive me, Lord.—A.

Fa-ged-da-boud- it!—G-D

U want the Blackberry back, Lord?—A.

Shove it where the sun don’t shine!—G-D!

2. Romeo and Juliet—The Balcony Scene

Romey? O! Romey? O! Where? For? RU?—Julie.

Am climbing the ivy now!—R.

OMG! It’s poison ivy!—J.

Now you tell me?—R.

Take me. I’m urs!—J.

Soon as I get there!—R.

Oops! Wait on balc! Mom’s at the door!—J.

Bring some calamine lotion, will ya?—R.

         (After 10 minutes…)

Romey? O! Romey? O! Where? For? RU?—J.

Tired of waiting! Maybe next time! Hugs!”—R.

3. Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton

Liar!—AB

Blackguard!—AH

Federalist!—AB

Republican!—AH

Royalist!—AB

Democrat!—AH

English banker!—AB

French banker!—AH

Ur mama wears round-heeled combat boots!—AB

My father can tar n feather ur’n!—AH

Ur’n?—AB

Yeah!—AH

In ur dreams!—AB

In urs!–AH

Up urs! U dont even have a father, u Carib bastid!–AB

I’ll kill u 4 that!–AH

Not if I kill u first!—AB

Yeah?–AH

Yeah!–AB

4. Abe Lincoln at Gettsyburg

(Speaking…) “4 score & 7 yrs ago. …”

U R SOOOOO HOTT!—a fan.

Where RU?—Honest Abe

In the crowd. Pink bonnet!—a fan

I see u now! Wow! Catch me after the speech!– AL

Please wear ur hat!–me

You like hats? AL

I like men with hats! And from here, urs looks very big!

R we talking about hats?

Is the Pope Jewish?

HAHAHAHAHA!

5. Buddha at the Deer Park in Benares

So that’s the bottom line: Life is suffering. … Questions?—B

Sir. … —Disciple 1

Shoot!–B

Does “Being” precede “Non-being”? Or vice-versa?—D1

How should I know?–B

Master…, How shall we overcome suffering?—D2

Follow the 8-Fold Path!—B

What happens when we die?—D3

The condors eat you.–B

Is sex with women OK?—D4

Most of the time.–B

Can money buy happiness?—D5

Enuf money–yes. 2 much—no!–B

How do we know when we have enuf?—D6

That’s the problem.–B

Beware of these eyes. … I’m the devil in disguise.

Take all you can get… and give as little as possible.

– Mae West (in I’m No Angel)

Dear William and Kate,

A thousand apologies for this tardy response to your late-arriving invitation! (I must confess, after my first question, “Why me—a humble-as-kippers American poet?,” my second question was: “In this era of girdle-tightening austerity, why the gilded note; would some churls think that ‘bad form’?”)

The fact is, I am rather certain this invitation is a mistake; that it was, in fact, meant for Gregory Corso, a renowned “Beat” poet with whom I’ve been confused for decades, thanks, no doubt, to similar assonance and consonance in our names. If it was so intended, that would also be a mistake, since Gregory is no longer whinnying with us.

Frankly, I wonder why you’d bother to invite any sort of “literary type” at all—especially a pariah type like me? Why not stick with the safer bets: a Thomas Friedman, say, worth some $50,000,000 of married-into loot–a bloviating bloke who thinks your flat little world just fine?

Why me? Did I win some sort of lottery? Each day I’m deluged with news from Nigeria, Liberia and Malaria, congratulating me for winning billions in lotteries I had no idea I’d entered. To claim my prizes, I merely must send my birth certificate, finger prints, foot prints and certified eye scans. (Obama-type birth certificates will not do.)

And now, as I have declined the lottery invites, I must also decline your kind invitation.

The fact is: I don’t know you. What I’ve seen of you on the inescapable mass media—the covers of magazines spying on me as I check out my Raisin Bran, the flashy images on CNN ad nauseum–quite honestly, I do not like. William is far too toothy, seems a bit serpentine, and Kate is too pretty to be with him–except for all that loot!

I mean: What did that guy do to deserve such luchre? (What does anyone do to “deserve” it?) Cause, you see, it’s getting kind of tight around here—and where you are, too—and a lot of us peasants are beginning to think: there’s an inverse proportion between money and democracy. The bigger the palace, the greater the malice!

I think it was Balzac who said, Behind every great fortune, there’s a crime. Thomas Paine went even further: he showed how the fortunes of the monarchies were based on the accumulated spoils of war; or taxing peasants into penury; outright theft from other “nobles,” and on and on. Why grovel before such ciminals? he wondered.

So, in 1776 and 1789, in 1848 and 1914, in 1948 and 1959—in America, in France, all over Europe, in Russia, China, Cuba, and at other times and in other places around this hurting world, we’ve thrown your kind into the sea or under the guillotines, or stood you before firing squads—to make you stop! Stop the thievery, stop the lies, stop the wars that line your bottomless pockets. (Okay. … Sometimes, as in Russia, we’ve gone over the top. No need ever to hurt children! If only your side felt the same way! Because you’re hurting children exponentially worse—all the time!)

Every time we think we’re done with you, you come back like radish indigestion, repeating some unpleasant taste, worse each time belched up.

Sharing the tabloid covers with you in recent weeks: British-born Liz Taylor. A fair actress blessed with physical beauty in her 20s and 30s and increasingly unpleasant to look at from her 50s on when her bad habits caught up with her. It’s said she died a billionaire. (A lot of innumerate Americans don’t actually “get” that that’s a thousand millionaires’ worth of dough!) It’s said she gave generously of her time to causes like AIDS, that she raised millions of dollars for AIDS. I wonder: if she was so “generous,” how did she manage to amass a billion? Let’s get this straight: It’s obscene to be a billionaire in a world where children starve! Nobody needs a thousand million dollars! Let’s start drawing some lines and figure out what kind of differentials might make sense. (Absolute equality doesn’t seem to work: humans just aren’t that good! So what will work? It’s a question evaded for centuries!) Liz Taylor managed to convince a lot of people who had less than she—many far less—to give proportionately much more than she. People in the “upper brackets” call this “philanthropy.” Christ called it hypocrisy. Somehow I don’t think Liz Taylor will make it through the eye of a needle any easier than a camel!

What’s the “royal family” worth—$50,000,000,000 (I like to write out the numbers!)? There’s Balmoral Castle with its 40,000 acres!–and Buckingham Palace and holdings in Ireland and God knows what else. Rolls Royces and hunting lodges… and meanwhile half a million Brits show up to protest the “austerity” measures of kiss-ass Cameron…, but William and Kate are looking cutesy and planning their nuptials. Charles and Camilla were caught in the last ruckus and you can see the disdain on their royal pusses. (They ought to call those “austerity” measures “asperity” measures because it feels like the people are being rubbed raw with a rasp!).

To be fair, we have our royal asses here as well. We’ve learned from you. We’ve got money to cut taxes for our super-rich—top 1 or 2 percent–, but no money to pay teachers in Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey—you name it. A mere three years ago, we had plenty of tax-payer money to bail out bankers and Wall Street fatcat-fast-talkers; but now: no money for schools; or to repair our roads and bridges; no money for health care. No money to replace our aging fleet of torn-up aircraft, opening up like cans of sardines! Money to keep the endless wars going, to plunder the oil. Money for nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs; money for mediocre actresses and trumped up candidates like, er, Trump—and Gingrich, Obama, et. al.; but no money to educate the masses about the meaning, power, responsibility and beauty of real, down-home democracy. We’ve got money to burn—so long as G.E. is making that money. They can build faulty nuke reactors at Fukushima and across the U.S., make $14,000,000,000+ in profits and get a $3,500,000,000 tax credit to boot! We’ve got plenty of dough to send up the smokestacks, but not enough for mental health programs to get to a guy like Loughner before he gets to a US Congresswoman and a 9-year old kid.

A couple of months ago I heard that 20% of American adults are suffering from mental illness! Which raises a chicken-or-egg question: Did a crazy populace create this inane government/society… or was it the other way around?

The late, great Joe Bageant saw modern America as a “simulacrum”—a false image of reality; or a hologram—something projected. We’ve been living with these projections for as long as I can remember—and I imagine the Greeks, Romans, ancient Isreaelites, Egyptians and Persians did plenty of projecting, too. I guess it’s in our DNA to want out of our own skins; to project onto a screen or a sky images of gods and goddesses, heroes and villains, archetypes of evil or goodness—a Christ or a Satan.

It occurs to me that maybe you’re both just dumb and you really don’t know what’s cooking. Maybe you’re that insulated in your bubble universe—or maybe you just don’t give a damn. (Tell me: Do you shit gold bricks?) Here’s a few items you really shouldn’t miss.

Formidable truth-warrior James Petras, at DV, reflecting on the 1210 billionaires who run the world, who are running this world into a putrid grave. Here’s another one that my writer-friend, Emily Spence, sent me.

You’ll find info like this therein: “Mass extinction, rainforests rapidly disappearing, clouds of pollution spreading across the globe and whopping carbon footprints are only a few of the incredible environmental quandaries we’re facing today, and the numbers will blow your mind. We produce enough trash to circle the globe hundreds and hundreds of times, and the amount of money wasted on the Iraq war could have solved many of the world’s problems. It’s not all bad news, though: we’ve got thousands of years worth of geothermal power at our fingertips, and the potential of renewable energy is amazing indeed. Here are 15 of the most mind-boggling green facts and statistics:

“Oxygen-starved dead zones [in the oceans] that cannot sustain life now cover an area roughly the size of the state of Oregon.”

“1% of Australia’s untapped geothermal power potential could provide enough energy to last 26,000 years.”

“Only 1% of China’s 560 million city residents breathe air that is considered safe by the European Union.”

“The Wall Street bailout is costing taxpayers around $700 billion and growing. Yet, just 4% of the Wall Street bailout could end world hunger.”

“Less than 1% of the world’s freshwater is readily available for human use.” Despite these problems, many people… are wasting water as if it will always be plentiful. … The average American household uses 300 gallons of water daily, with many wasting thousands of gallons every year on lawn irrigation.

“Every day in the U.S., we produce enough trash to equal the weight of the Empire State Building.”

“The Iraq War has cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 trillion. … A website called 3trillion.org lets you go on a shopping spree with that money, and EarthFirst.com found that we could have spent that money on all of the following and much more: universal health care for every American, switching all of the U.S. to run on solar power, building a national rapid transit system, cleaning up pollution in major cities, achieving universal literacy, repairing the damage done by Hurricane Katrina, providing non-violent leadership training for 10 million leaders across the world and buying new clothing, shoes, coats and school supplies for 10 million. …”

“Within 10 years, wind power could provide 20% of America’s power. … as T. Boone Pickens points out, ‘If the government commits to modernizing our nation’s power grid in the same fashion that we modernized our highways, we can make some serious progress in a relatively short time.’”

“Recycling one ton of paper saves 17 trees, 2 barrels of oil, 4,100 kilowatts of energy, 3.2 cubic yards of landfill space and 60 pounds of air pollution.“

Kate and Willian: How many tons of paper will your nuptials generate? Not just the gilded invitations…, but the reams of periodicals? A tsunami of wasteful confetti!

Here’s a little more to ponder:

“The human population on earth has grown more in the last 50 years than it did in the previous 4 million.

“One in four mammals is at risk of extinction.“

“At least 50 million acres of rainforest are lost every year, totaling an area the size of England, Wales and Scotland combined.“

“Average temperatures will increase by as much as 12 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the 21st century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at the current pace.“

“If the entire world lived like the average American, we’d need 5 planets to provide enough resources.“

Now, with all this going on in the world, Kate and Bill, is it really fair that you Europeans have dragged the world’s policeman—yeah, US—into a neo-colonial, neo-liberal war in Africa? It’s not enough that we’re fighting our own imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and helping Israel for decades to fight its wars of occupation and expansion–now you want us to save your oily asses in Libya? To “save civilians”?

That reminds me: I’m having a bit of trouble getting my next book of poems published. The esteemed publishing houses here suggest that I should change the title. It’s now called:

BOMB THE BILLIONAIRES! F*CK THE CELEBRITIES! SAVE THE CIVILIANS!

What do you think? Should I leave the “u” out, or put it back in?

Look, guys, I really don’t mean to come down so hard on you. You’re probably just a couple of spoiled kids and you’re probably no worse than ten million other spoiled kids in this gaga world… but that’s the problem. We can no longer afford to indulge you. We’re sick of your moats and your draw-bridges and your gated communities while our unspoiled kids are digging in the dung heaps looking for a few scraps of KFC chicken wings.

The fact is, Bill… I liked your mama. She not only looked good, but all the pomp and circumstance and all the attempts of the royal family to keep her caged could not disguise the fact that she had a heart, could relate to “commoners”–who genuinely liked her. Mostly I liked her because she had guts. She walked through a minefield to spotlight the danger of such unexploded ordnance—especially to children (who are still getting crippled or killed by such every year in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.) I’d still like to know what really happened to your mom on that fateful night in the Paris tunnel.

Well, I’d like to know about a lot of things: the Kennedy assassinations, MLK’s, Malcom’s, 9-11, the BP oil spill, HAARP and so forth. It seems the more I know, the less I know. I’m only sure of my ignorance.

And maybe this: This is my home. … I live here with 7,000,000,000 other souls… and there are only 1210 of your kind here. This is my home… and you and your kind have been messing it up and strutting around like you own it since the pharaohs, since Angra Mainyu, since the time of Huang Ti. …

This is our home, all that we have—all 7,000,000,000 of us… and you… you are the guests in our home, and not the other way around!

That scientist-poet Carl Sagan said it as well as anyone:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

William and Kate: Get over yourselves! This culture of excess must end… or we shall all end soon “on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Lose all your troubles, kick up some sand
And follow me, buddy, to the Promised Land.
I’m here to tell you, and I wouldn’t lie,
You’ll wear ten-dollar shoes and eat rainbow pie.

– “The Sugar Dumpling Line,” American hobo song

“Today, almost nobody in the social sciences seems willing to touch the subject of America’s large white underclass,” writes Joe Bageant on page 2 of his second book, Rainbow Pie.

So what’s this self-professed and proud-of-it “redneck” do? This memoirist combination John Steinbeck, Michael Harrington, Henry Thoreau–with a funny bone to wallop your gut—what’s he do but produce the best book on the unsung 60 million (cozened to vote against their own self-interest, fodder for corporations’ wars)—write the best book on them that anyone of his generation has written!

Bageant knows the territory like the back of his ham hocks. Now a frequent guest on NPR and the BBC, Bageant has had his journalism and commentary in periodicals and at websites around the world (check out www.joebageant.com for a compilation). His first book, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War, announced to the literate world: here’s a thinking writer who can make you cry with the tenderness of his character depictions of the real folk, and make you livid as he shows how their “operative community democracy” was sliced and diced by corrupt media, religious charlatans, and, yeah, the military-industrial complex.

Deer Hunting is an excellent book. Rainbow Pie is even better. Rainbow Pie is about now; Deer Hunting laid the groundwork, sowed seeds of memory for this West Virginia-born sui generis intellectual. Rainbow Pie brings those seeds to fruition amidst our present devastation—the “financialization” of the “transactional economy.” Translation: outsourced jobs; debt and desperation in the homeland.

Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir
By Joe Bageant
Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2010
(U.S. edition, 2011)
September 2010
Paperback: 310 pages
ISBN: 9781921640629

Now mid-60ish, Bageant’s witnessing is astute and acute; he’s been there. “When World War II began,” he writes, “44 percent of Americans were rural, and over half of them farmed for a living. By 1970, only 5 percent were on farms. Altogether, more than twenty-two million migrated to urban areas during the post-war period.” And they engendered children and grandchildren who swelled their ranks by another 40 million—uneducated rural whites and their descendants who form the foundation of “our permanent white underclass,” outnumbering, btw, the other poor/working poor—the Hispanics, blacks and immigrants.

“Even as the white underclass was accumulating,”Bageant writes, “it was being hidden.” Hidden or ignored in the universities…, and caricatured and cartoonized by the media merchants—Beverly Hillbillies then, King of the Hill now! “The official version of all life and culture in America is written by city people,” Bageant avers.

And avers this: “While all those university professors may have their sociological data and industrial statistics verified and well indexed… they’ve entirely overshot the on-the-ground experience.” It’s there—in that experience that Bageant excels. “I went to a one-room school with a woodstove and an outhouse,” he tells us in the intro to Rainbow Pie. And in that same intro he confesses his nervousness about writing a “damned” memoir. “Angry memoirs weeping over some metaphorical pony the author did not get for Christmas in 1958.” But this homespun poet need not worry about flimflam. He can write lyrically like this:

It happens perhaps once or twice every August: a deep West Virginia sundown drapes the farmhouses and ponds in red light, as if the heat absorbed during the dog days will erupt from the earth to set the fields afire.

And sociologically like this:

In all likelihood, there is no solution for environmental destruction that does not first require a healing of the damage done to the human community. And most of that damage… has been done through work, our jobs, and the world of money. Acknowledging such things about our destructive system requires honesty about what is all around us, and an intellectual conscience. And asking ourselves, ‘Who are we as a people?’

And he reveals truths like these: “Maw and Pap were married in 1917. He was twenty-three; she was seventeen. Pap had walked nine miles each way for over a month to court her. … Their world was mostly just birth-to-death work, and pride in the fact that it was such. ‘My man is sure enough a worker,’ Maw observed.” And, “In symbolization of their union, Pap planted two rose bushes that he fussed over and nurtured until his final days.”

What his parents and their neighbors in his boyhood’s West Virginia, and in the small city in Virginia where he spent his later school years—what they lacked in material goods and sophistication and knowledge about the outside world was more than compensated with a sense of belonging: “Their kind of human-scale family farming proved successful for twelve generations because it was something more—a collective consciousness rooted in the land that pervaded four-fifths of North American history.” And, “Farmers grew more connected in a community network of seasonal mutual efforts, such as threshing, hunting, hog slaughtering, haymaking, clannish marriages, and birth, burial, and worship. Their conventions were still being observed… as I was growing up.”

And that’s the life—the lost life now—that Bageant sings and laments in Rainbow Pie. His art is in the singing of particulars, and how he weaves social, economic and political facts into the warp and weft of stories about salt-of-the-earth characters passing away before our eyes: “For the first time I understood something. I didn’t quite know what, but I knew it had to do with the passing of all things, and that eternity does not care about that passing.”

Bageant’s book is poignant, humorous, peopled with characters who “cast their own shadows”; and, it’s incredibly informative. It’s his way of marshalling hard facts while telling stories about decent, independent-minded people buffeted by economic and social forces they cannot grasp that makes his work so special. About the post-war rural-to-urban migrations he writes: “‘Organizing for war’ had taught industrialists and government agencies the best ways of organizing the American population and its resources toward heavier and more profitable production, both of which lay in worker aggregation and concentration.”

“Eternity” may not care. … But in Bageant’s mighty and tender hands, we do.

In another world they do not put a man to death for asking questions: assuredly not. … When my sons grow up…, O my friends…, I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing. …

– Socrates (from Plato’s Apologia)

For speaking truth to power… a cold cell.
Naked now…, and yet, they fear you!
You watch a spider weave, perhaps recall
The crime scene, viewed on a monitor:

Men like puppets dancing in the dust, fired
On by U.S. drones; and the button-pushers
Laughing, ten thousand miles away—life reduced
To video porn, sordid and crazily robotic.

The robots shop, vote, fuck, kill, do business,
Take meetings, squawk endlessly democracy,
Free markets; get replaced—interchangeable—
In the Machine… until a voice says “No.”

And the house of cards collapses; the dream
Recedes; the dark, stark landscape, revealed:
A people bought for bread and circuses—
Mostly circuses—more silhouettes than people.

But the voice remains: Socrates in the agora;
Christ among the Pharisees;
Galileo Galilei; Paine and Thoreau;
Gandhi and King—questioning, exposing.

Now in the shackled world, a moan goes up
From the well of our debasement: Cease
And desist: the depredations; soul-murdering;
Earth-murdering. … The implacable voice arising.

Out of the chrysalis of what has been,
A global being struggles to be free:
To extricate its wings from the wax of retributions;
To save the dying planet; to balance and revere.

Shia, Sunni; Christian, Jew; Buddhist, Hindu, pagan;
Male and female—fledging to resurge anew:
Out of the yearning cauldron of suffering
And endurance—diamond-cut humanity.

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

— William Butler Yeats

I was pushed without my permission
into a tangle of birthdays.
listen, eavesdroppers, there is no such thing
as a bed without affliction…

— Lucille Clifton

Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

— Alexander Pope

Five thousand years pointing at the sun;
Five thousand years at moon and stars;
Rising out of sand, each building block
A Mac Truck of solidity, sheer weight
Defying reason, begging the question,
How?

Five thousand years of pharaohs and invaders—
Semites…, Hyksos…, Hittites…, Nubians…,
Romans…, Turks…, Frenchmen…, Anglos…, Yanks…
And the Nile flooding, the Nile receding,
And all along its banks:
Life and commerce; birth, love, suffering, death.

Akhnaton sleeps with the first dream of God;
Boyish Tut and long-lived Ramses; Cheops
And asp-kissed Cleopatra. … Bored French troops
Take pot-shots at the Sphinx; Nelson slaps
The Little Emperor’s fleet; the world winds on;
Gamal Abdel Nasser sleeps—all entombed
In the embracing sands of the enchanting dream.

And then, in an instant, the sun dial of the pyramids
Moves a degree, shudders between
Shadowy and luminous… and the awakened behold
In the mirrors of compatriot eyes
Themselves!—singing, dancing in streets and bazaars,
With the old world scratching, gawking, How?

And…, Why now? What next?
But it is as though
Those apexes of stone, those points of light
Have punched like awls through leathery Time
To the enveloping atmosphere
Of what has been,
Notched the belt of our perceptions,
Knocking from our human solar plexus
The breath of wonder… seeing emerging
From beneath the Sphinx’s haunches
A blood-swaddled babe, wailing
Possibilities.

Truly men hate the truth; they’d liefer
Meet a tiger on the road.

– Robinson Jeffers

What it’s not

First, let’s clarify: a “meme” (rhymes with “scream”) is not what Sarah Palin says when she goes on a family outing with her daughter; as in, “Meme Bristol’s gonna shoot up some mooses.”

Even in herspeak, that don’t get it.

What it is

According to Wikipedia, “A meme, a relatively newly-coined term, identifies ideas or beliefs that are transmitted from one person or group of people to another.”

Except that it’s more than that: more like a transplanting than a transmission; more like an entire constellation of ideas and sentiments flowing from person(s) to person(s); a packet of info from mind/heart to mind/heart or group mind to mind(s). And these ideas and sentiments are but feebly scrutinized, and, generally, not even realized to have been absorbed between organisms. Like a simple computer virus that can crash a system.

A little more from Wikipedia: “A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices [and, of course, values!—GC], which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. … Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.”

Americans love memes—whether they know it or not. Memes shortcut and short-circuit real thinking and analysis, and give the opinionated something to opine about. Herewith follows some especially noxious specimens.

1. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

I was 14, watching JFK’s inaugaration on the 13” black and white TV my parents kept in the kitchen when I first heard those ringing words. And… they resonated. There was this movie-star-handsome president (!), with great hair, eloquently delivering a message to unite the country in a noble mission: to bring justice, freedom and democracy to the nation… and the world. “To meet any challenge.”

But… fifty years later, hearing the words repeated incessantly by every 2-bit MSM newscaster, hearing the dissections and bifurcations and vivisections, all I can say is “Bullsh*t!”

Kennedy himself, I’ll give a pass. It was the height of the Cold War, and he was a young, untested leader. And, a Democrat, taking on the mantle of respected—if not loved—Dwight Eisenhower. We were locked in what Kennedy described as a “twilight struggle” between “freedom” and “tyranny,” between “democracy” and “Communism.”

Kennedy was spewing one meme after another—or Ted Sorenson was… or both of them—and its doubtful that he—or they—ever realized the extent of their misdirection.

For the goal of a meme is to inspire… not to educate or enlighten. The goal is to cloud and mystify, not to clarify.

So, half a century later, it is clear: We not only must ask what our country can do for us, we should, in fact, demand to know! That is the essence of what Rousseau called the social contract. I shall give up a portion of my earnings, I shall pay my taxes, I may even go, or send my children or grandchildren, to war to defend my country. But… I can never surrender my right to interrogate my “leaders.” As an adult, I recognize my obligation to be informed and to hold my “leaders”—political, economic, social and cultural—accountable for their expressed ideals.

In recent years, we have witnessed the debacle of our economic system when too many “asked not” what their country, or Wall Street bandits, or mortgage lenders, or Savings and Loans, or commercial banks, or hedge funds—were really up to. “We the people” complacently sat on our asses and let our “betters” run the show. It was a “really good shew,” in Ed Sullivan’s words, but it ended the way it had to end when intellect takes a hike on a prolonged sugar spike. “Asking not” sowed the wind… and now we reap the whirlwind. … And that’s no fatuous meme!

2. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Jefferson gets credit for the phraseology, but the ideas had been kicking around for a while, notably among John Locke and the Scottish philosophers. Since the European Enlightenment, the ethicists, the moral philosophers, had struggled to define “natural rights,” what we generally call “human rights” now. For most of those philosophers, including T.J., the real struggle was to define “property rights.” The rebels of 1776 postponed those splitting-hairs discussions for the Constitutional Convention—and the much more pragmatic and legalistic document that came out of it. No need to rupture the nascent union over questions about how to consider slave property; would that represent 60% of a human or 59 and a half? Better to go with the catch-all phrase and let the rabble read into it.

Problem is, we’ve been reading into the “pursuit of happiness” ever since, and generally making a botch of it. Whose happiness? How is happiness defined and achieved? For too much of America’s history, happiness has been synonymous with prosperity. As long as enough people were sufficiently prosperous, the general welfare was secure.

The equation of happiness and prosperity tips the scales of a just and admirable life with fools’ gold. It redounds in the sort of confused delirium that ends with a mania for tulip bulbs or sub-prime mortgages.

All the great teachers have warned us against the seductions of “happiness.” “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” Christ taught. And, “Lay not up worldly riches.” Buddha’s final words were: “Be a lamp unto yourself.” Not, as the modern gurus would have it, “Be happy!” Kung-fu-tzu advised a responsible life, meeting one’s obligations to family, to the State, to friends, peers, subordinates. Laotze cherished balance. A few hundred years before the Nazarene, Rabbi Hillel expressed the Golden Rule in the more easily followed non-affirmative: “Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.” And the gadfly of Athens said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

I recall an essay—it was either by Emerson or Tolstoy, I was reading them both at about the same time: the author took a spontaneous walk through the woods on a moonlit night. He came to a clearing, looked up, and was suddenly overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of it all—the gentle breeze, the shimmering stars blinking through passing clouds, moonlight and rustling leaves, and a fragrance of wildflowers. And he was transported with a sense of peace, contentment, joy—happiness. The next night, the moon was about as full and the weather the same, and he went out along the path, came to the same clearing, looked up—and felt nothing.

The lesson is clear. Happiness is a by-product of a life well-lived. A life filled with meaning, good deeds, truth. It can’t be forced. It’s fortuitous. Pursue it–and lose it. “What mad pursuit, “ Keats wrote. “What struggle to escape!”

Keats died of consumption at 25. The disease—tuberculosis—had claimed his beloved younger brother a couple of years before, Keats nursing him to the end. It was a terrible, wasting disease of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, exacerbated, no doubt by the smokestack industries popping up like pimples all over the land. Consumption then; consumerism now. The same wasting disease.

Jefferson himself could never squre the circle. Certainly “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” had nothing to do with Native Americans—the Turtle Islanders. He signed the Indian Removal Act which Jackson was to enforce some 30 years later, after the discovery of gold in Dahlonegha, Georgia. Some 17,000 Cherokees and 2,000 of their black slaves (!) were forced to trudge at gunpoint through snow to Okalahoma. Thousands died on the way.

The magnificent redhead, the studious Francophile, enjoyed his bourbon and ice cream, his slave-mistress Sally Hemings, and his cultivated life at Monticello, accumulating huge debts, on the backs of 150 slaves. Upon his death, he bequeathed his slaves to his daughter. Washington, at least, had freed his slaves in his will—provisioned upon the death of his beloved Martha. This no doubt led to some wakeful nights at Mount Vernon, as Martha lay abed, listening to branches crackling underfoot, trying to discern meanings in the day’s glances or meanings in mubling behind closed doors. No doubt, some unhappy times!

3. The Second Amendment.

This is the motherlode of American memes. It’s better known than the 2nd Commandment, and those who worship it will defend their right to do more truculently than those who subscribe to the Mosaic Code. It holds its place with those few memes identified by numbers: The First Amendment; 911; 1776.

With the random murder of six innocents in Tucson, the near-killing of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and a dozen others by one Glock-toting maniac, the gun debate is boiling again. The apparently inoperable-tumorous meme in the midst of our Bill of Rights reads in its entirety:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Over 30 years ago, I watched “Meathead” on All in the Family try to explain to Archie Bunker, America’s favorite bone-headed bigot, the subsuming importance of that conditional clause. Michael Stivic’s efforts were, of course, futile. “Happiness is a warm gun,” the Beatles sang about that time. Lenon’s ironies were lost on his assassin.

The matter should have been put to rest, the argument concluded, back in 1794 during the Whisky Rebellion. Opposing the excise tax on whisky, a small army of 6,000, mostly Scotch-Irish frontiersmen, assembled in western Pennsylvania, threatened to attack government garrisons to obtain weapons, destroyed the stills of those who had paid the tax, modeled themselves after Robespierre and the Jacobins, cried havoc and let slip the dogs of war.

Fortunately for the nascent Republic, the best dog-catcher of the age, the one who had proposed and implemented that tax and others to raise the capital essential for the Republic’s survival, Alexander Hamilton, was there to stop the would-be guillotine-erectors. “There is no road to despotism more sure or more to be dreaded than that which begins at anarchy,” Hamilton wrote at the time. To oppose the poorly-led rebels, A. H. assembled militias from New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia: a mostly disciplined—they, too, loved their whisky!—force of 12,000 well-armed and provisioned men. There were some skirmishes, some deaths, rebel leaders were captured, imprisoned, and, chastened, and ultimately pardoned by Washington, whose paramount objective during two terms was to keep the fractious nation whole and out of the unending wars between Britain and France.

Apparently the lessons of the Whisky Rebellion have dimmed in the minds of those fervent advocates of “the right to bear arms.” They yammer about their need for Glocks and Uzis against an oppressive government whose most perfidious act will be the seizure of their arms! (They seem to yearn for such a seizure!) That seizure will signal the advent of a new age of tyranny, and light the torch of freedom anew in the hearts of millions of Glock and Uzi armed patriots.

Trying to argue against these memes is like trying to argue with Archie Bunker. So much detritus to work through! So many cobwebs to clear! So much history to back-fill! The lack of so much common sense to decry and lament!

Might not one argue that the seizure of personal firearms would be the least likely act of a tryrannical government… that anarchy would work just fine for controlling a Mad Max world in which the authorities could bring jets and predator drones, tactical nuclear weapons, etc. against an army of gun-slinging cowboys?

So, let’s talk about “arms.” As in, “couldn’t-hit-the-broad-side-of-a-barn” arms. An expression as old as the Constitution, and apropos of the personal firearms of our beloved forefathers.

Their weapons—for hunting rabbits, deer, racoons, “Injuns” or redcoats—were muskets. They were unrifled, could shoot ball or shot or both. About four times a minute, a handy rebel could load his musket with black powder, look down the barrel length—no sites!–and fire. That unrifled ball could fly off like a curve ball. One was unlikely to hit a man-sized target at more than 75 yards, “aiming” straight at him—or the side of a barn at more than a hundred. Once in Concord, Mass., near the “old stone bridge” that Emerson monumentalized, I heard a guide explain that more soldiers had died in the Revolutionary War as a result of bayonets than muskets! The principal “armor” against musket shot was good, strong, fibrous clothing—often spun from hemp!

Let’s also recall that in those days we were a fledgling agglomeration of “states” spread over a vast territory, with under 3 million people—mostly farmers and slaves. People knew their neighbors. If the village idiot—a certain young Jared, say—was seen running around with his musket protruding from his britches, people would have had the time to stop him, toss him in the pig pen and disarm him once and for all. It’s dubious he’d ever have had access to that musket in the first place. And his lack of wherewithal would have saved their lives.

4. “The future is ours to win.”

Once you start thinking about memes, it’s like having cataracts removed—colors emerge more vividly; you start seeing patterns in carpets, in wallpaper. It’s like suddenly seeing Snooky’s face for the first time on HDTV!

Okay, forget that!

The point is, they’re everywhere. More than cliches, more than the banalities that used to fill those empty spaces between the synapses, memes come in a multitude of colors, with images, sound track, Facebook personalities!

“911,” for example—the official narrative… or, the better, “fringe” explanations!

The assassinations of JFK, Bobby K, MLK and Malcolm X.

“The falling dominoes” that never were, for which four million lives were sacrificed. (Check out Gareth Porter’s “Perils of Dominance” for insight into the real story of the Vietnam War.)

“American exceptionalism”. … “We’re number one!”

“The wisdom of the voters.”

“Change you can believe in.”

“The War to End all Wars.”

“The War on Terror.”

“The Cold War.” (Check out William Blum’s “Killing Hope” for the best book about the Cold War. Reads like LeCarre—only it’s non-fiction!)

Not just words, but a panoply of figures marching across the TV sets of our minds, the movies, the political rallies, demonstrations, electronic imagery meshed with e-mail conversations, infiltrating every neuron—memes define, refine… and devour.

“Move on,” for example.

Some character gets devastated in a movie, a book… or you hear about it in the news. You see the tornado or the mudslide or rain torrents destroying houses, schools, churches, lives. People are broken by earthquakes and cholera. And then some pundit announces, “they’ll have to move on.”

A beloved child dies, 31 students are massacred, and we are exhorted… to “move on.”

To what, where, how?

Why… to the future, of course. That great meme in the sky.

And so Obama, master of ceremonies, magican of memes, declaims in his State of the Union, “The future is ours to win.”

And—presto!–the future becomes something tangible, something already there—the brass ring just needing deft fingers to grab. We have only to see ourselves “winning” it, and it is ours. (Kind of like Texas and northern Mexico in 1848!) The eternal vision of the vanquishable American frontier.

Except that… eleven years into our new millennium, one hopes for something more!

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child. … But now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things.”

We should know by now that the future is not something to conquer, something to “win,” but something to share, and that we’ll never understand the future—and very possibly not survive into it—without integrating our past and present, knowing truly what we have done, from where we’ve come, and what we are now in this crazy quilt of peoples and species blanketing this planet. We need “integration” in the sense of wholeness and integrity. Attachment to memes divides and tribalizes us. The ability to discern and assay our common lot, can unify our fracked and fractured, our wounded planet.

How to be whole again? Fully aware, conscious and conscientious? To look beyond memes, to probe deeper, to ascend to a higher view?

Memes are signposts, markers on the road to Oz. When we meet the Wizard, we must challenge him wisely, or lose mind, heart, courage—and never get back home. Life is learning… putting away, with cherished memories if we’re lucky, childish things.

Our problem is not so much that we have chosen the wrong memes, as that we have failed to develop the discernment to know what is what—how to value correctly, to espy the very real tribulations we shall reap from disparities of wealth, the plundering of resources, greed and stupidity. We celebrate the quick-buck hucksters, the mealy-mouthed impostors, and disparage the steady, steadfast striving after excellence and truth.

And we wonder about happiness? And how to serve our nation and our world? And how to organize for the struggle?

“See, now they vanish,” the poet wrote.
“The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured in another pattern.”

And…,

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

Truth is a bandit, Truth is a screech-owl
And the polar winds are howling.

Solar flares and the weather vane cuckoo,
We click out a mordant Morse Code
About Liberty, and God, and our free will.

2.
Baby boomers are booming out;
We’ll peter away with a whimper.

With money to burn, we burned it all
While California-dreaming.
Now we’re beggars in our children’s houses.

(Except for the rapists selected to lead us,
Grinning from ear to ear,
Serrating our warbling throats.)

3.
70 million in two world wars
Went to their graves mis-believing.

They died for rumors of rumors of war,
Allegations of allegations,
Cloth banners in the charnel house of hate,
While the power and glory mongers
Pulled the grenade pins, raked in the dough,
Built bone temples of severed limbs
In which we continue to worship.

4.
A savage race, a servile kind,
Shaken by hysterias.

The barn is on fire.
The horses are screaming.