Category: Fiction

Other problems include the fact that this system rewards the least scrupulous behavior and penalizes community oriented behavior. It concentrates wealth in the hands of the wealthy and in so doing also concentrates the power at the top, creating a plutocracy in the least case and economic feudalism in the worst case.
The problem in the United States is a kind of willed ignorance. A decision that people make not to know things. I think that is the primary problem in the United States;that people with education and access to information make a choice not to know things. Because to know things if one retains any sort of moral sensibility, if you know about something that's going on that is inconsistent with your own principles, once you know about it there is the moral question about why have you not acted.

 

In the United States part of this mass mediated, mass marketed mass medicated world is about allowing people to remain willfully ignorant. That is another level that we have to combat. This is where I often find myself again in tension because if you look at things like the movie industry and television and spectacle sports, all of this industry that is designed to keep people out of touch, that has to be resisted and when you resist that, then you are told that you are being elitist and ya know you got to understand that it is good to go to the Cubs game now and then. And I think, “No!” I actually think that's part of the problem. So these tensions work out too, in organizing. How do you reject that part of the society without doing it in a way that seems to be talking down to ordinary people? How do you make that analysis part of a bigger politics that tries to offer an alternative to the mass mediated, mass marketed, mass medicated world? So its both about critique and construction of alternatives.
Robert Jensen – “The Old Future's Gone – Progressive Strategy Amid Cascading Crises” which can be heard in its entirety at Unwelcome Guests #428 and #429.

“The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but is the Government’s greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest.”

“The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.”

“Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few and the Republic is destroyed … I feel at the moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.” —Abraham Lincoln

“Every citizen silently, but never the less certainly, sustains the government of the day in ways of which he has no knowledge. Every citizen, therefore, renders himself responsible for every act of his government.”

“No action which is not voluntary can be called moral….Any action that is dictated by fear or by coercion of any kind ceases to be moral….Freedom of the individual is at the root of all progress.”

Mahatma Gandhi

“The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.”

“If you are going through hell, keep going.”- Winston Churchill, Nov. 21, 1943

MAY YOUR SKY ALWAYS BE YELLOW
He always wanted to explain things, but no-one cared.
So he drew.
Sometimes he would just draw and it wasn’t anything.
He wanted to carve it in stone or write it in the sky.
He would lie out on the grass and look up in the sky and it would only be the sky and the things inside him that needed saying.

And it was after that that he drew the picture.
It was a beautiful picture. He kept it under his pillow and would let no-one see it.
And he would look at it every night and think about it.
And when it was dark and his eyes were closed he could see it still.
And it was all of him and he loved it.

When he started school he brought it with him.
Not to show anyone, but just to have it with him like a friend.

It was funny about school.
He sat in a square brown desk like all the other square brown desks
and he thought it would be red.
And his room was a square brown room, like all the other rooms.
And it was tight and close. And stiff.

He hated to hold the pencil and chalk, with his arm stiff and his feet
flat on the floor, stiff, with the teacher watching and watching.

The teacher came and spoke to him.
She told him to wear a tie like all the other boys.
He said he didn’t like them and she it didn’t matter.
After that they drew. And he drew all yellow and it was the way he felt about
morning. And it was beautiful.

The teacher came and smiled at him. What’s this? She said.
“Why don’t you draw something like Ken’s drawing?
Isn’t it beautiful?”
After that his mother bought him a tie and he always drew airplanes
and rocket ships like everyone else.

And he threw the old picture away.

And when he lay out alone looking at the sky, it was big and blue;
and all of everything, but he wasn’t anymore.

He was square and brown inside and his hands were stiff.
And he was like everyone else. All the things inside him that needed
saying didn’t need it anymore.

It had stopped pushing. It was crushed.
Stiff.
Like everything else.

[Turned in to a high school English teacher 2 weeks prior to author’s suicide.]

Cause the old future’s gone

The old future’s gone

You can’t get to there from here

The old future’s gone

The old future’s dead and gone

Never to return

There’s a new way through the hills ahead

This one we’ll have to earn

This one we’ll have to earn

Hunters in October

Raise their guns in sport

Is war another animal or

A beast of last resort

The beast of last resort

The old future’s gone

The old future’s gone

All passengers must disembark

The old future’s gone

Fear took down the winged life

The winged life we’ve led

So kiss the joy as it goes by

Poet William said

Blake the poet said…

John Gorka “The Old Future’s Gone”

“I never did hear the words Native Americans, American Indians, or First Nations in school. I was taught about the Civil War and Slavery, but never did the word Native American come out of my junior high school history teacher’s mouth. He was the football coach of our team, the “Red Skins.”

I began college right after my high school graduation and took the course, American History to 1877. The Department Chairman taught that course. Consequently, I became so upset at being made to read “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown in that class, that I could not sleep for two nights.

On Borrowed Time is a 1939 film about the role death plays in life, and how we cannot live without it.  Set in a more innocent time in small-town America, the film stars Lionel Barrymore, Beulah Bondi and Cedric Hardwicke.

Lionel Barrymore plays Julian Northrup, a wheelchair-bound man, who with his wife Nellie, played by Beulah Bondi, are raising their orphaned grandson, Pud. Another central character is Gramps’s beloved old apple tree.  By making a wish, Gramps has made the tree able to hold anyone who climbs.

One day the fedora-wearing Mr. Brink (the personification of death, played by Cedric Hardwicke), who has recently taken Pud’s parents in an auto wreck, comes for Gramps. Not knowing who he’s talking to, a crotchety old Gramps orders Death off the property. Later, Mr. Brink takes Nellie, and then returns again for Gramps. Now realizing who Mr. Brink is and determined not to die, Gramps tricks Death up into the old apple tree where he must remain until Gramps lets him down. While stuck in the tree, he can’t take Gramps or anyone else, for that matter.

Meanwhile, Pud’s aunt (his mother’s sister), has designs on Pud and especially the money left him by his parents, and Gramps spends much time fighting off her efforts. Gramps is also fighting efforts to have him committed to the insane asylum for claiming that Death is trapped in his apple tree. He proves that no one can die until he allows Death down from the tree by shooting the man who has come to take him to the asylum – the man lives, when he should have died.

Gramps’s doctor is now a believer, but he tries to convince Gramps to let Death down so people who are suffering can find release. Gramps refuses – he has to remain alive to take care of Pud and keep the wicked aunt away from him. But Mr. Brink manages to coax Pud to climb the fence Gramps had built around the tree to protect people from Death – any person or animal who touches the tree dies. Pud balances on the top of the fence and then falls, crippling himself for life. Distraught, Gramps takes the boy out to the tree and begs Death to take them both, which he does – and both Gramps and Pud find they can walk again.

The final scene has them joyfully walking together up a beautiful country lane, listening to Grandma calling to them from beyond a brilliant light.

——————————————————————————–

As a child, I saw this movie on TV sometime during the late 50s; and I have never forgotten it.

(Iglesia is a serialized novel, published ….rarely these days!…on Tuesdays and Saturdays at midnight ET, you can read all of the episodes by clicking on the tag.)

Previous episode

Mr Diamond was perhaps the least hypocritical and least morally conflicted person on the planet earth. At a very young age, an elderly matron who had just been kicked by Mr. Diamond’s tiny foot had called him ‘an evil little boy.’ It had stuck. He, furthermore, had liked it. He was also extremely intelligent. Watching television growing up he had always rooted for the bad guys…and wondered why they never won.

Except on the news.

(Iglesia is a serialized novel, published ….rarely these days!…on Tuesdays and Saturdays at midnight ET, you can read all of the episodes by clicking on the tag.)

Previous episode

Mr. Diamond looked out through the rain from the hooded, hidden window of his mountain stronghold. When he heard those words in his head, he smiled.  He had waited all of his life to have a mountain stronghold.  He had, in fact worked incredibly hard and waited all of his life to be the kind of stupendous bad-ass evil villain ….who had a mountain stronghold.  That had an army of assassins at his beck and call.  That had the power of life and death over virtually everyone on the planet.  He had waited all of his life…and now finally…it was all his.  

And unlike in the storybooks and the movies, where the villain was unsatisfied with the power that he had ended up with, he was very satisfied.  There was no man he could not kill.  There was no woman that he wanted that he could not have. He had read all of the stories and seen all of the movies and he had made sure that beyond any shadow of a doubt…that he. was. a. villain.

THE villain.

Otherwise, what was the point?

(Iglesia is a serialized novel, published ….rarely these days!…on Tuesdays and Saturdays at midnight ET, you can read all of the episodes by clicking on the tag.)

Previous episode

They had not made love. Coupling on the bed had been instinctive, a response, an act of primate behavior, the fear and dread of death too big for even sex to conquer…..for now. Near death experiences bond humans together in a fundamental way. Having their real, actual death, yet continued real, actual existence demonstrated to them so shockingly had left them nothing to cling to but each other.

In the morning, they felt like children, children who had moved to a new town, a new country, a new world. Not knowing what they would face but knowing that it would be totally new and completely unexpected.  Rogers entered, and shortly after him, so did the breakfast cart.  It came rolling in and stopped behind him, propelled guided and stopped, they realized, by his will.  A reminder of the new rules of their “existence.”  Milk was poured, lemon squeezed, and kippers were silently eaten, before Iglesia raised her eyes and asked in a small voice, “So …..what the hell are we?”