TIME CAPSULE: A pre-Bush Prophecy, from September 21st, 2000, of What We Could Expect He’d Leave Us – Eerily Accurate

 

An Unearthed, Un-Retouched Premonition – Cogent and Prophetic? Or Eerie, Unfathomable?

by  SillyMickel Adzema

Primal Spirit: The Deeper Wave of the New Age

www.primalspirit.com

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http://www.geocities.com/sillymickel/authenticity.html

I recently unearthed, March 9, 2009, 9:49am, three never finished drafts of an article I intended to publish on my website prior to the 2000 Presidential election.  Stuffed and interwoven among the electrons of the backups of old computers, I had completely forgotten ever having written any of it.  Engulfed, indeed, pushed around and battered within the intensity and sharpness of recent political, geopolitical, and economic and financial forces, I was shocked to see the words, written almost a decade earlier, which, desperately intoning, warned of specific dire happenings should George W. Bush be elected. For it seemed those exact words, of so long ago, had just been lifted from the headlines and front pages of today’s daily news.

Prophetic?  Eerie? I don’t know quite what to make of it. It certainly disturbed me and got me to wondering, and then to writing. Perhaps now, as I lay before us the thoughts that I couldn’t help but ponder, and alongside them the thoughts expressed in the writings of that little remembered time, you and I, just might, perhaps in ways that we would never even be able to express to each other, nevertheless find revealed to us something totally unexpected, maybe even wonderful. By looking closely, we might just get a peek beyond life’s veil surround; we have here the chance of capturing a glimpse beyond or into that mystery that has been said to be just beyond our limited senses, that place of awe and odd activity, a mere membrane away from the normal, which mystics, sensitives, seers, and sublime artists, claim to sense and sometimes speak. Take that as you will; still there’s no denying the fascination and fixation that these awesome unknowables held for the likes of Einstein and William James, pinnacles of rationality to the world, yet regarding these things in their attempts to communicate them only ecstatic and rhapsodic language would do, and even at that, they would claim they could not come near what they were intuiting. So, here, perhaps, is just that kind of rare opportunity, rare for ordinary people, for getting such a glimpse of that sensed but unseen reality beyond the common-sensical one, perhaps a keyhole into Mystery itself.  Certainly possible all this, yet I have to be extremely careful to note that I was hardly the only one thinking these thoughts nine years ago (the most recent dates on them are 8/19 and9/21/2000).

It saddens me what could have been.  Reading it, I am stunned by how we’ve managed to vanquish from our minds and our media the insane, chaotic, and truly awful outlines of our times, as the events of the last nine years crept daily into our lives and world and shaped them and it in drastic ways that we can discern only by the contrast.  These unpolished cat-scans of a mind and time provide such a contrast, stark and shocking.

So these writings I will reproduce here for your consideration. However do keep in mind the date on the upcoming writing. The last date this piece was even touched was, as determined by the “date modified” figure, exactly 8/19/20000, at 9:41pm. That date, so long ago in my memory, really shocked me, especially in terms of the parallels with events today that were equally salient then.  The entire piece is on the long side, I’m sorry to say, but if you, like me, are a real political junky, I think you’ll find a lot of meaty stuff.  Substantial and important zeitgeists of that time are I believe made palpable. Considering what is going on right now in our political arenas, it may seem so tangible that you may forget that it is not about today. So I must stress that in no way, even slightly, was this writing altered.

Okay, my bad.  I feel the need to pause here and to make the most sincere qualification about what I’m attempting to show and how I’m insisting on garnering the utmost I can of integrity and credibility for this investigation.  So, we pause for this qualification:  Let there be no misunderstanding of what is written and why it is included, editing incomplete. First, it reads pretty well, as is, as it had a good deal of editing, before it fell through the cracks, as other things came into my life and kept me from getting back to it.  But it seems a little choppiness or even confusion around certain phrasings is far superior than to have its authenticity as being the exact creation of that mind of nine years in the past at all questioned.

I’ve already related about my astonished feelings at having come across this long forgotten piece of writing.  But, you see, I knew I hadn’t seen or even remembered writing this.  I knew that without question.  For some people that might be difficult to believe, but then I doubt that many of those have reached the age of 58, like I have.  No, I’m not claiming, as people laughingly say when, being older, they forget something that they’re having a “senior moment.”  For me, it really seems — although this is also meant to be more humorous than exact scientifically — but it really seems that I’ve only got so much room on the old hard drive up there, and year after year, decade after decade, of piling in more and more information on increasingly diverse subjects, to boot, it seems to me, just sort of requires that one has to “delete” some of the older files; there’s not even enough room to archive them.  This is not as silly as it might first seem, for I don’t believe a generation has ever existed of humans who have had more information, changes, and so on, thrown at them over the course of a lifetime, requiring them to learn it or else to slip back in the ranks, not be able to compete on a par, as not even the worst consequence.

I won’t get into the need to stay on top of ever more complex material to just keep one’s house, to not have one’s money dribble away in complex investments, or even to keep from being taken to the cleaners by the IRS because of tax codes that are so meticulously structured to suit an array of special interests, rather than structured for fairness for all and simplicity.  Don’t get me started.

The point is, you know, just from an overheated outpouring of information coming out of and turbo-charged by the cyber revolution, that we all, in the course of our lifetimes, are confronted with such overwhelming change and information.  It is overwhelming in itself, but tack on the fact that you don’t even have a choice in the matter.  The advances in technology, just to take one example, require that one learn, relearn, and then relearn something different about the same thing a few years down the line.  You know that it’s driven by the incredible changes in computers and the software, but it has catalyzed changes in every other area in our lives, so that everyone, no matter their job, is forced into lifelong learning just to keep up.  I’m not saying anything new here, why even the American President addressed this point in his campaign when he emphasized the need for societies to have structures in place to facilitate this “life-long learning,” which, as he put it, in the coming decades and with the increasing speed of changes, is going to be ever more required in order for folks to keep up and to stay in the work force as they age.

So this problem is one that was first noticed, perhaps, in the Fifties, when there was talk of the “rat race,” with the image that one never could keep up. It was stunningly symbolized in the movie, “Brazil,” where one character walking on a windy street is hit by one paper, then another, and they keep sticking to him, despite his fervid, then frantic attempts to get them off him.  He gets frantic because the papers accumulate so much that they, gradually but inexorably, cover every part of him, eventually papering over his head, then turning him into a struggling ball of paper, for all you can see; till the struggling stops, the huge ball of paper rolls around a bit on the sidewalk, and then is hit by the wind, whereupon, at first slowly, then increasingly, the papers blow away and the ball gets smaller and smaller – you keep wondering when the man will emerge – but, quite horrifically, I would say – it slowly dawns on you that the person has disappeared, who was inside the overwhelming mountain of paper (for paper, just substitute information).  And the papers, you see, are all eventually taken up by the wind and blown away – one last tiny paper tornado swirling on the sidewalk, then it too dissipates leaving . . . nothing.  Can’t tell you how many times I felt like that!  Can you dig it?

So, however you look at it, I neither remembered, but I also did not want to change a thing, and I needed to show that I didn’t, so that I would be believed on this entire premise.  As it will become clearer, the fact that this could have been written and certain things foreseen is not just an anomaly, nor is it an ego trip. You will see it goes against a particular mindset that we’ve been led to believe over the last eight years is all that can be expected of us humans, even when we somehow rise to the highest positions in a government.

I’ve already related about my astonished feelings at having come across this long forgotten piece of writing. I repeat that it will be reproduced exactly as found, without even changing obvious typos or even confusions of grammar. The least I could do would be to do all I could to avoid any suspicion that it was somehow tainted or, god forbid, that anything was added, that any wording coming out of today’s media was included to bolster my case.

Ultimately you can choose to be suspicious of its validity, but I can only do what I can to allay as much suspicion as possible. I know that basically you only have my word on this.  I can only say that I feel no need to puff myself up nor do I care if you don’t see what I think is obviously there. And that’s the thing, you see. If you suspect its validity, then the things that it has to teach us and the illumination that came to me, will be lost on any one too suspicious. But then, getting back to Earth now, for what purpose would I pull such a stunt!? After all this is not a high-stakes ploy. What would I be gaining by lying? I could have written this up without bringing in this document, too. So do what you will. I’m convinced that a little common sense will reveal to most folks that there’s little gained by any contrivance on my part, and that, when you hear the things that this incident provoked in my awareness, I think you will not think them anything but reasonable on their own merits. The document is just a convenient mirror in which we can see things that we mostly know, and here’s the point, that somehow we have been taught to forget, lately, mostly without our realizing it, and since intentional, why it would be done.

At any rate, I certainly thought at first that I was reading something about the current collapse when I read what I had written in early 2000.  I think I’ve said way too much without providing some meat – what kinds of things did I find? OK, in mid-2000, long before Bush was put in power and had a chance to show anything at all of what kind of President he would be, I wrote these words concerning what I thought would be the result of a George W. Bush getting elected:

I believe we are in grave danger of losing, not just an election, not just a Supreme Court, not just our environment, not just our good economy, not just our recent relative peace in the world but things far worse than those horrors.  I believe we are in danger of losing all hope of maintaining, let alone progressing, in the freedoms and privileges that we take for granted.

That was my fear nine years ago.  But just in the last few weeks, I’m hearing such things, which, now knowing what I had said, and no doubt felt and thought more extensively about than what I actually put on paper; and not being Nostradamus, I’m saying that obviously my mindset was not unique and was shared, I know among many of my friends and colleagues, at that time, and probably even far beyond that.

So, when I’m currently hearing these comprehensive evaluations and calculations in recent books by scholars, with enough clout and credibility to be broadcast on the mainstream and from several sources that a) the government under George W. Bush was run essentially like a dictatorship, by any definition of that.  That we lost our democratic rights, among so much else, and the only thing that kept us from realizing this was the resistance by media and the populace to be able to face such a horrific prospect.  So, basically, until it was over, hardly was there anyone with the courage to look squarely at what he was doing and has done and add it up; that is, until he was out of office.  People who have lived under dictatorships can I’m sure understand that reluctance to point out such an horrific prospect while still under the regime’s thumb!

And, the second thing I heard was the calculations of a scholar, who, adding up the damage left behind in America – economically for the most part, but otherwise as well —  that there was no way, ever again, that America could expect to have again the relative prosperity, opportunities for the majority, not to mention standard of living, and so much more.  Essentially this person was saying that George W. Bush had managed to so “kneecap” America during his short (though long they seemed) eight years that America would never ever recover.  An astonishing assessment, echoing like the announcement of the fall of the Roman Empire.

We haven’t always had the best of Presidents, but this person’s thesis, in the midst of the dire things coming out, and they continue to pile up, is being widely considered – while hoping him wrong, people are not discounting that he may be the only one getting it right, for it cannot be denied that few are brave enough or have strong enough stomachs to actually go piece by piece through the wreckage and add it all up and place it alongside the best assessments of America’s needs and responsibilities in the decades coming.

So it is with these things in my mind that I read that statement about Bush leaving a legacy from which America will never recover, which I had written 9 years ago and then forgot.  But you are not me, and so the explication as well as need to completely leave the document as I found it, incomplete sentences and all.  It is reproduced exactly below, without even changing obvious typos or even confusions of grammar. For I did not want anything to taint or draw suspicion around what you mostly have to take my word on.  I can only say that I feel no need to puff myself up nor do I care if you don’t see what I think is obviously there.

But still thought I’d give my best case possible to you for my credibility.  For if I garner a bit of that, the reader just might see and understand the astonishment that I felt.

This might seem to be overdoing it, but I’ve noticed that we live in a time where those in power, making these huge blunders, like to excuse themselves by saying “Well, no one, before the fact, had ever considered for a moment that people would take planes and crash them into buildings,” for example.  For that one, former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.  It’s a statement she has made since 9-11, and even had repeated it in her last days in office.  Never mind the well-known, and widely reported Intelligence that was released after 9-11 that had concluded that Osama bin Laden determined to strike in America using planes to crash into buildings, statements given to the American government many months before the catastrophe and which Rice herself is known to have been aware of months before the crashes, and which journalists record her having little interest in, despite several attempts at briefing her on it.  And she is only one who makes the same claim, denying the warnings (the Intelligence was the most damning, in that it was specific, in pointing to a lack of vigilance, and an apparent narrow ideological view which made them, apparently, not see all the evidence, required to make valid assessments.  But rather they were predisposed to certain conclusions and so scanned for the pieces that supported that.

We know in retrospect that is what happened, and we know how disastrous that view was.  Which is why I am writing this.  It is simply high time for people who knew better to stop letting these ideologues whose very ideological bent was arguably the reason they failed so horribly, to get away with the ignorance defense.  It is one thing to say that one did not oneself consider certain outcomes or possibilities, but to claim that “no one at all” ever thought these things….  Well, it is ignorance, literally, to ignore, that caused so many in power to, ideologically bent, simply see only what they wanted to see.  But, proven wrong, and shown and pointed out that there had been plenty of evidence to have led one to do things differently and to get it right, and to still claim that no one else knew, is defined as lying.  It may be human nature to lie after one has screwed up so badly, but it is not required of humans.  And others have many times admitted they were wrong and humbly admitted their failings in not considering the very evidence in front of them.  Bush’s Scott McClellan is one such person, he was the Communications Director under Bush, and wrote a confessional book admitting that he should have known better and done differently.

No, it is too damn easy to say “human nature.”  People in such positions should, let us say, we would hope, have a tad more of the noble in them, a bit more integrity not less, or they shouldn’t be allowed to take such positions, which require at least the integrity and nobility to be working for the betterment, protections, and the increase of all of Americans, over against one’s own interests; and need I say over against one’s egotistical desire to try out on the world stage some ideological theory.  Else, hell, there’s lots of folks – many are Democrats – who would have tried a lot harder under the same circumstances.  So, it strikes me as more than arrogant for people who created these situations out of their own ignorance, greed, and so on, to excuse themselves by basically painting everyone else with the same brush.

No, Rice and Bush and Cheney, who all engage regularly in this, “No one could have known” excuse, do not have the right, after being given (or after having taken) the reins of the most powerful governmental forces, to place themselves as innocent and humanly unknowing just like everyone else, as they perpetrated the kinds of deeds of evil that they were so ready to decry, and put down, in others, and now to escape their mistakes and their ideologically driven lapses of such consequence, to be making themselves feel superior and safe by saying, essentially, anyone in the same situation would have come to the same conclusion.  Well, the facts are, as I will be pointing out again and again, that when you make the conscious decision to eliminate contrary points of view, even when there are more of them than support your bent, and having ignored reports, stifled opposition, and insulated one within a group of monolithic true-believers; all while that entire America and the world is requiring you to get it right; NO, when you basically set it up so that, after hearing things you don’t want to hear, you make damn sure that the only people that are around or will even be allowed in (Bush took it so far as to never allow anyone even in one of his town hall meetings to attend if they were not fully on his side), it seems to me, to be more than arrogance, I don’t know, to say that, having drawn one’s circle so small, and against the better interests of the American people that you would at least, having been given the job, to do it as well as any small businessperson and simply find out everything one can before making a decision..

But now, why would it be?   Why this need to go so far in denying the facts?  Why the need, which as pointed out existed during that long period where it became increasingly clear that the Administration had gotten so many things wrong for lack of “doing one’s homework” that so many of the Bushies, like Rice, also felt this ignoble need to excuse themselves of their mistakes not saying they’d done wrong but, amazingly, adopting and engaging in the same kinds of excuses of common criminals, even a mass murderer to explain one’s failings.  For as Charles Manson used to like to say, “how do you know what you would have done if you’d been in my shoes?  How do you know that you’d not come to the same conclusions and actions after experiencing and learning what I did?”  And adding, “What I’m saying is that all you smug people, thinking you’re so above the rest of us and so incapable of continually assert how good you are and to exaggerate with fake loathing and revulsion how different you are from these others?  Why, except that you are aware of having some of these things inside yourself, a little bit of Manson, or Bundy, or whatever?  You are aware of these tugs and pulls and so your protestations aren’t they mainly to try to fight back those things?”  And here he would laugh, “You see, what you people don’t want to admit is that we are all alike on the inside; and that includes the evil.  That also includes the good, which you would deny that I have.  In fact, you do not want to know that you could as easily done this as I did, under the correct circumstances.”

While, there may be some truth in what Manson and criminals like him have claimed, psychologically speaking and his pointing to hypocrisy is certainly often merited, still he is talking about the human psychology and the imperfections of them.  One can easily grant that humans are not perfect, but that does not mean that we’d all become killers in the same circumstances.  That is something one cannot know.  But what we do know is that different people can be in a particular situation and react completely differently:  one may act nobly, even heroically; another may act cowardly, finding excuses, blaming others.

What I’m saying it that is unseemly to an nth degree to hear those who have taken over our government through their claims to be better, be smarter and more able, and to be more ethical – and would that include a little integrity, even nobility of character.  So for these people, who have driven this country into the ground, after claiming higher ethics, character, morality, all the rest, than their opponents, indeed, so high as to warrant their receiving the job of most responsibility and requiring the most integrity than any other one in the world.  So then, after all that sales pitch at the beginning their excuse for screwing up is essentially that they were just the average Joe, the C – student, who didn’t like homework, and it being “so hard,” that they made common mistakes – one’s that anyone would make.  Well, 1) EVERYONE DID NOT MAKE THESE MISTAKES!  And you showed yourself too incompetent in not even listening to them, and 2) if you’re so common, then how dare you place yourself above everyone else and lie about your character and so on.  If you were lying about all that as a political ploy just to win. .. so that you could, what, have power?  Help your friends and yourself become enriched, or whatever?  Well the lives of all humans on this planet are affected by the decisions of that office.  And if your intent was a selfish one, then the whole world suffered, for it was a job for them that you were hired to do.  Not doing your job, and lying to the American public to get the job, is more than unethical.  It becomes treason when the office is used to extort from the American taxpayers, huge amounts of money to give to their rich friends and to corporations with ties to the administration like Halliburton, who made money hand-over-fist with no-bid contracts.  No, that kind of stuff is not the stuff of mistakes but if intentional.  It is using the highest office of the land, and taking the hopes of us all, from the little girl who wants to see her Daddy again, the many languishing in hospitals for lack of health care …. The list is endless … it is assuming to be their hero, while spending one’s time dismantling the government and the benefits it provides for us all, which for several hundred years have been worked out.  And for one administration to trash and plunder that government for its own selfish ends is not a matter of “I didn’t think of that before.”  No, it sounds like the excuses of criminals because that is what this recent bunch actually were.

So that’s an example of what I’m getting at, which is that, despite so many denials, especially by the people in power and their lackeys in the media – all claiming that they could not foresee this, could not foresee that, that this was truly unprecedented, and that nobody could ever have seen such and such coming. What I’m proposing is that in fact many did see many things coming, not just unheard of and powerless me (although isn’t it significant that even I could pick up on certain things), that it was not a lack of astute people, but let us say an intentional leaving out of the conversation of policy, any and all minds who could have and would have advised more correctly and would have prevented much if not all that has transpired and which now leaves America in a crisis to top all crises, at the worst possible time when so many other things of global significance are on the line.

(Can you say it with me, “Thanks George W. Bush for all your efforts and “hard work” which have led, your decisions and your Administration solely to blame – thank you for being “THE DECIDER!” — to leave us in the midst of so many dire and rapidly expanding problems, so that many people are not just wondering if they will have a job or money, but that even if this planet will make it through another fifty years. So, hey, thanks for all the hard work and for relieving us and all our grandchildren of any money, and…. oh, I see, there probably won’t be any planet for the little dears to live on. And everyone dead and all. Why, gosh, Mr. W., you’re so smart, you probably knew that! So that’s why you and your cronies went so far as to commit grand larceny even at the end, scraping the last of any money in the Treasury for the high-pressured auto trading that you had your guy Paulson, former head of Goldman Sachs before coming to take this position for you. And now we find out that none of that money went where it was intended to go and it did not change the situation but rather exacerbated it! More on that later. But just want to say how cute you are, W.. I mean, it was just, soooooo you! We heard afterwards how your guys gathered Congressional leaders and without exactly explaining how it would happen – of course Congressmen could not be expected to understand the workings of economics and high finance like a Paulson could. So, kindly Paulson and his deputies explained using analogies, how nice of them to bring it down to their level, so sweet of them. And the analogy they used was that if Congress didn’t cough up the dough pronto – perhaps those weren’t the exact words, my bad. But anyway, that the consequences – and tell me W. this was all you, right? – The consequences would be that of a “GLOBAL NUCLEAR MELTDOWN” (tell me, that part was you, right?) a terminal global nuclear meltdown that would (wait, I’m getting an inkling here… was this next part, Cheney’s?) “End modern civilization as we know it for the foreseeable future.” Wow! It gives me shivers just hearing it. I mean there ain’t no auto salesman in his wildest fantasies that could come up with something so absolutely, well, disabling. You guys really took those suckers in Congress “out by the knees”! How could they have had a chance! And, boy, there’s that nuclear threat again. How clever! I mean it worked to get us into a war, but this is economics. But that’s my George, the W. himself, going with what he knows. And, hey, why bother coming up with anything else, that card’s a winner for you, my man…. And c’mon, level with me, I just gotta know, won’t tell anyone else… Was that Cheney with the “end of civilization” part? C’mon, it’s got to be him, that’s just sooo Darth Vader, who else could think like that. Please tell me I’m right; I feel like I know this guy and that is well just sooooo him!… )

Well that was fun. But, more seriously, we find that there was plenty of help for Bush in pulling off his Ocean’s 12 caper. Take Paulson. Respected, regarded, head of Goldman Sachs, the acknowledged best and brightest of the Wall Street analysts, savvy folks who at the beginning of the banking crisis, as brokers like Merrill and Lehman were crumbling, some never to be heard again, Goldman Sachs was rumored to have come out quite well. It is said that they, when nobody else saw it coming (there’s those words again), invested to protect themselves in case of a downturn; perhaps shorting or buying puts, I’m not sure. But that even struck me as rather astute as I had been doing the same thing, foreseeing a financial collapse, and not taken up with the Bush Administration’s cheer-leading of its own economic policies measured in the stock market and led by CNBC analysts all, especially the slavish Kudlow and his claims that Bush had produced a near perfect “Goldilocks Economy.” This he repeated over and over, even as the market slid. And when it did it was always the fault, according to Kudlow, of someone who had it out for Bush and his policies. Seriously, hearing this guy daily, salivating on and on about Bush, you’d wish they’d just a got a room.

Getting back to Goldman Sachs, however, Paulson long gone, not even leaving records of where the money went, apparently just handing it out like candy to his friends. And we were told that we just had to trust him, for it was so dire, and yet so far beyond our ability to understand. Maybe so, but then when it turned up recently that a huge chunk of that money went from Paulson to a European bank (a German one, I believe, not that that matters). And that this bank turned around and paid Goldman Sachs $16 billion. To which I can only, sarcastically (what other attitude can one have and still remain comfortable while writing!!) add, well, way-ta-go there Paulie, good job, Paulie, now that’s one round about but rather effective way of collecting a debt. Makes me wonder then just whose nuclear meltdown would be in the offing, just whose civilization would end. As we will see further on, these people are and always have been seeing themselves as SO FAR ABOVE US, and they manage to convince the rest of us that they are that (just look at how they convinced Congress and are going around a second time and are succeeding again! They are SO FAR above us that they truly, and I mean this sincerely for reasons that I will get into, they truly see their fates, fortunes, and futures as equivalent with all the rest of us. I.e., and now I’m tipping my hand a bit, like kings of old who might suffer depression and soon all in the kingdom would be claiming to suffer depression too (or would be obliged to say they did?). And, by the way, this is nothing like the kind of Unity of Consciousness I speak of later. No. No. Think of this more along the lines of “We Are Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” And more exactly it is this 25,000 year old pure and simple patriarchal authoritarian daddy power and their ability, with all their underlings depending on them for survival, to require the soul-loss and the robotic obedience of a group, each of whom know they will fare better materially (and being kept, most often, at a mere subsistence level) any improvement would be dearly competed for, and how would they compete? You might ask? Well, how dear to a king’s heart is the underling who it seems so loves of the king that he also suffers whatever the king does. Now that’s a pretty slavish thing, as humiliating acts of self-annihilation go, the aping that one is so in unity with the king that indeed they will suffer the same. (OK, now you say it with me, “Get a room!!”).

But this point is to explain the seeming inexplicability of the power of such people, even over against that of a Congress that was trying to show some spine at that time, even though it was still dominated by Republicans, even they were having qualms of this kind of railroading, which several decried – and this is where I got it from – as seeming so much like the tactics of a slick auto salesman.

(Tell ya what, I’m going to do. You just sign this paper here; it’s only got a tentative price on it, I won’t hold you to it, but this will guarantee that beauty won’t be scooped out from under you tomorrow morning before you’ve had a chance to come in. Now, I know you love that car; and, quite honestly I want to see this deal go through, because I know a good match when I see it; and that car will be great for you. Leave it to me, I’ll talk to my supervisor tomorrow, I’m going out on a limb here, ya’know. But if I didn’t make my customers happy, I wouldn’t be happy, for that is what it’s all about to me. Just sign here, next to that number, and tomorrow we’ll see what we can do as far as bringing that down so it’s more affordable to you. You know, I wouldn’t do this for anybody else. But you strike me as a man of class. And I just know that you’re not going to let some minor discrepancy or other get in the way of your getting the vehicle that someone of your stature really deserves. And that’s what I’m I’ll about, I’m here to serve you and to get you the car you deserve. No, don’t worry about signing, it’s not a contract, really. In fact, if you change your mind by tomorrow, I personally will guarantee you that I will put in any time necessary to find the one of your dreams. Now you couldn’t do better than that, could you? Really now. I guess I’m just a sucker, but hey, I don’t see this job as selling machines, but more like arranging marriages. Like the Matchmaker – you know “Fiddler on the Roof” – ha ha! (yea, right there anywhere, will be fine… oh, that pen not working, well here I’ve got plenty, in fact here have a couple, give one to your kid from me. There you go, now you’re doing the smart thing. I figured you to be a smart person the first time I saw you on the lot a little while ago. Well, anyway, I know you want to get home to your family, and tell them the good news. Well, of course, we’re still going to work on those figures tomorrow. Let’s just say I’m pretty damn sure I can get my supervisor to see it more your way, so I’m assuming we’re going to have the deal that’ll make you happy. So g’won now you old charmer, before you get me to throwing in a second car in the deal just cause you’re such good people. Yea, it was good getting to know you too. So I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow. Oh, yeah, OK, I understand you can’t get here till late afternoon, I just assumed nothing would be able to hold you back once you though of it at home. Yea, g’night…. (pause. Now salesmen yelling out a little as the man retreats.) Oh, Mr. Bonior, just one small detail, if you don’t mind. Now, I know you weren’t sure about that undercoating, but I’m telling you that it’ll add years to your car, and, like I said, that may be something we can throw in; and if not, well it’s not that much. So d’ya want me to have that taken care of before you come in tomorrow? I can guarantee to put my best guy on it first thing in the morning, so the only think you’ll have to think of is how luxurious it will be driving home in this sweetness. No, you say no? Ya sure now? I mean you look like a great couple to me (chuckle). Not getting cold feet at the altar are you? (chuckle, chuckle) You’re sure you don’t want it, not yet. Okay, tell you what I’m going to do. You ARE a hard bargainer, darn you. (he he). Look I’ll put my best guy on it, he comes in at 8am. I really think that when you leave here you’re going to want to take this car away tomorrow, not another day. Now, now, relax; I heard you, just let me finish. I’ve been in this business a long time and by this point I hardly ever, if that, miss one of these “love at first sight” affairs I saw tonight. So, hear me out, it’ll be the best deal of your life, call it my “wedding gift”: Like I said I’ll put my guy on it in the morning. But if you call and let me know before that, well, then I’ll just take him off it, and crack it up to I just didn’t know you as well as I thought I did. On the other hand, here’s my “gift,” let me have it put on for you and – like I said I can probably get the cost completely waived – but let’s say I can only can half of it waived. Well, I’ll personally split the difference on the remaining cost with you; take it right out of my commission. It might mean I make $5 on this deal, but what the heck. Like I said it’s all about making you happy. (Mr. Bonior turns and throws up his hands and walks to his car) OK, great, sounds like we got a deal. So, see you tomorrow, you’re going to be glad you came walking in her today, believe me. G’night again.)

Back to the astonishing “Paulsie” scheme, as one person astutely put it, when anyone tells me I have to sign on the dotted line that day, or else . . . well, never once has a situation like that turned out right. Someone, I don’t remember who, was way ahead of everyone else. He used the word, “extortion.” We now find out, only in the last few weeks, how close to or exactly like extortion have been some of the tactics of the TARP money’s recipients toward the very Congress that provided them the money.

Once again, no matter the situation, and despite the outcries of the American Republican Administration, who claimed to have encountered one after another of unforeseen and unprecedented events, no one ever dreamed could happen before. Such was always the refrain. In case I need to use an example or two to remind some readers of the prevalence of that claim and the absurdity of it as well: We see, Katrina, the unholy disaster wrought by that hurricane. Louisiana is devastated, particularly New Orleans. The administration responds so horribly that the death toll is eventually no longer being announced in the media. Claims that it might be in the thousands were quelled by daily counts that only slowly recovered the dead, so that as the toll rose into the teens and 20s and u to 50, it was telling all of us listening that it may not have been as bad as we thought in terms of the loss of life. Not so, actually, as I told my wife, many people died in their attics, inside their homes, and they haven’t even gotten to those neighborhoods. Indeed, I listened and only heard one time, years later and as an afterthought how several thousand had indeed been killed in that horrible flood. So, two things we notice in this example. The subtle way the media keeps anger at the administration in check by downplaying the horror. They couldn’t have done it any better had they been directly in the payroll of the government as the forces are who obeyed Bush’s commands to not let there be any TV coverage of Iraqi soldiers returning home in pine boxes and that even the graveyards were not to allow open caskets. So there is this collusion that is hard to understand. We’ll look at that a little later. But, the inane refrain is always, and everywhere, and loudly proclaimed on all the airways, the Republican lackeys, along with Bush himself, proclaiming, Bush, in an innocent voice: “Who would have thought the levees would breach? This is horrible for the families, and blah, blah, blah, (but now back to covering my ass again:) We had fully prepared for a big storm, but no on predicted the breach of the levees.” There is no euphemism for that kind of outright lie, and he deserves no covering up from anyone; he’s had too much already. No, indeed, I myself listened to storm reports over and over again for three days preceding landfall and sure enough, there was that one thing that was of concern to all: that the levees would breach. It was described what a devastation that would be; New Orleans being like a bowl, with much of it below sea level so a breach would not flow back out on its own. More was said: how the levees had been a cause of much concern for years prior to the storm as those in the city knew that they needed work and strengthening in a big way, for they knew that if the big one hit, it would be about as devastating as it turned out to be. But we here from Bush: no one expected the levees to breach. Truly astonishing was the degree of lying that Bush – Cheney and others in that administration proclaimed, and which, despite even the media making at least some minimal amount of noise about certain things not being exactly congruent with certain facts, and so on (one could do a great study of euphemisms for the many and varied ways that the media covered Republican comments without ever, not once using the word lie, or liar.

I promised two examples, so how about the gem I discussed earlier in which Condoleezza Rice, year after year, takes refuge in this idea that “No one could have foreseen terrorists using planes to crash into buildings,” despite specific warnings delivered to the U.S. and specifically brought to her attention, which said exactly that.

But remember, when one meticulously surrounds oneself with only true believers, and fills posts with of importance with people with questionable theology degrees, and routinely stifles dissent (as was viciously done to Valerie Pflame to get back at Joe Wilson’s speaking out), then how will you ever get any information except that which you already know; or better yet, how will you every learn anything that does not in fact reinforce your beliefs, so how will you learn anything different that you might need to learn?

Let’s back off from the administration a bit, as I want to now show an example of how this exact same mindset was coming out in the mainstream media, particularly in regards to the crashing of the stock market. This idea that nobody knew or could have prevented the debacles we’ve seen, we’ve seen not only in Republican government, but seems to be the common denominator among those who perpetrated the things that have led to our calamity.  A big part of this occurred on Wall Street; and since I’ve been an active trader, on-line, off and on, since 1996, I’ve watched this whole thing unfold.  I can only say, that, tuned in every day, and simply being aware of certain patterns of reporting, I could see deep trouble was coming, which I’ll get into in a minute.  First, a salient example of the attitude expressed above (“nobody could have imagined…”) being used also on Wall Street as an example.

I vividly remember an event I remember hearing on the financial news in America, on CNBC one day, sometime last fall.  One of the expert trader/commentators – a person I’d often seen on the show — was being interviewed on the floor of the actual exchange, seeming surrounded by evidence of the carnage; there were actual strewn papers and such, just like in the old days, as I remember it, as stocks were tumbling (again!) with such rapidity that even the old call out system was being implemented, for some reason – for certain financial instruments anyway. And there had been the confusion and the outcries, and yes, even the panic that one would expect to see in an old movie about the Stock market Crash.  In the midst of this all, this trader/expert was asked by the CNBC interviewer, about his take on the scary and unprecedented retreat from stocks and those days of multi hundred point losses, one after the other (think back to October, for one example).  This elderly obviously seasoned personality seemed to balloon out several sizes of his suit, in his sheer incomprehension and his near perfect confusion.  Raising his voicing, a little more squeaky and almost embarrassed, he yet proclaimed as if written on tablets first, how “all the traders have lost money,” and then “Nobody’s doing OK… ”  But his afterthought hit me like a spear:  He pleaded, “I mean who last year at this time foresaw anything like this coming…I mean,” he said “anything at all, at all, like this coming up?”

At home, There was no way to restrain the howl of laughter that triggered in my, while at the exact same time, I experienced this sharp pain in my belly, like I’d been stuck, well and good, by a spear.  I couldn’t believe this “expert’s comment. I pondered, Is it funny, or horrible, that I had been making money hand over fist as I kept shorting the market, buying only puts, having fully expected this crash ever since Bush had put in his tax cuts for the rich policy in the first year of office. I expected it to come near the end of his second term, like had happened to Reagan who had employed the same asinine throw money at the rich (so they won’t spend it to create jobs, but instead will buy yachts and – one big rage of the Reagan era – buy expensive art, which they bid through the roof, making headlines in those days, as one art object after another would break a new record. At the time, we all thought: Great idea, Ron, baby. Now you just tell me how money locked up in art will somehow create jobs and tinkle down on the poor.

Yet here, only twenty years later, I see this seasoned elderly guy, — obviously he’d seen more than I could ever have – of the workings of Wall Street. Yet he had not had a clue that this downturn could happen, nor apparently, had anyone, any trader, or any CNBC talking head, seen a thing. (Where were they 20 years ago, I wondered.) Still, lowly me, is it because I’m a Democrat? Lowly me, well I did I remember the way Reagan’s “Robin-Hood-in-reverse” economics created a great recession, which brought Bill Clinton to power, incidentally, but also how everyone was alarmed at the size of the National Debt, which, during Reagan-Bush I, had more than tripled.  And my mentors in the market, the ones I picked who were not afraid to look squarely at the fundamentals and who were not Republican cheerleaders or in bed with the interests we see now running for the exits like a bunch of cockroaches when the light is turned on.

I also watched as these Republican-speaking mouthpieces for the rich and for the economics of greed were more and more the only voices being heard when the Mr. Ed chart markings of the DOW began that nodding, as if to say, “I’m weary of being artificially propped up, Wil-ber!  I just want to lie down, to let my head hang low, to rest, to not have to confirm self-serving theories of rich people, using their wealth to make the biased and twisted thinking of their underlings to be sounded endlessly above the din of the moaning masses as year after year they see their costs going up, wages stagnating, and their efforts, doubled, tripled, and beyond without being able to get their heads above it.  You see, Wilber, I’m tired of doing your bidding for reasons bigger, I think much bigger, than just it being wrong and that this thievery perpetrated on the helpless is more feudal than economic, despite the big smokescreen of the god of capitalism or the supposed “free market.” No, Wil-ber. And no matter how funny it might seem to you and your friends . . . this pulling off of a prank, once again, of stealing from the poor, as you would see it, just a hilarious juvenile prank, like locking up a freshman in his own locker. I can hear you laughing, but as much as I think that cruel it is still not the really big reason I’m rebelling.

You see, Wilber, what’s been done again is so much exactly as its always been; no matter the talk of democracy or progress. It might as well be a time of kings and nobles, or any time or place in the past; there has always been “strong men” or a “strong man,” at the center of human suffering. This story is the same old story of the rich making up rules to suit themselves that has been going on ever since humans stopped wandering and began living in stable groupings that allowed some men gather more things about them than others. For when your kind were nomads and gatherers, more gypsy-like and free-spirited and trusting in the invisible forces to be kind and to provide whatever one really needed; I’m saying that as wanderers and nomads, no one of your kind wanted to “own” very much for it then had to be carried ever after; hardly worth the burden. Much more like the other beings on this globe, like my own kind you were then.

But then there was that fear that came over your species, unlike anything ever before seen among the rest of us creatures of God. A fear of uncertainty, quite strange. For we think it joyful to not know what the future will bring, and believing in a higher forces that really ARE good and loving, we expect to be loved and blessed and gifted with whatever fate the future brings, knowing there is nothing that is not a product of that consciousness of All, which is both good, for All, and perfect, beyond what mere creatures can know in the moment. So we are happy with our lot, never understanding why your kind chose to forego the glorious, blessed lives you had at one time: There was in the beginning such a closeness with what you call divinity that we saw you happy and playful as little babies when Mama plays peek-a-boo behind a towel or handkerchief. Even you know how the little child is alternately a little distressed – where did Mama go? – and then when Mama reappears from behind the veil, smiling, loving, happy, and saying “peek-a-boo, I love you,” why the squeals of happiness are the greater for having been fooled into thinking something distressing was happening but wasn’t. That is the way your kind, we have observed for the as long as we were aware of your kind . . . that is the way that we have seen your Mama’s teach their children that Mama will always be there, even when she seems not to be. And this learning is precious to the child, for it gives the baby a foundation of certainty that love is around even when not seen.

And isn’t it obvious that it was a teaching meant to be about more than the protection of mothers. Wilber, Wil-ber, that learning was so much like the way we learn, falling down but finding there is always love around and that we will be up again and back in the mix, if we just let the many blessednesses around us come to give us what’s necessary, always, and we know there can be only one source for that constant love and attention, a spirit of love and perfection, always on our side, teaching and guiding and leading us, often in spite of ourselves! For like Mama, it knows the truth, and we do not. So we trust it. This loving perfection spirit we don’t see with our eyes but feel in our muscles and heart.

But not your kind. Why, we’ve observed with increasing astonishment as little by little and then more and more, in dribs and drabs, your kind forgot the joy of the freedom that can only be felt in the simplicity of owning little, and therefore the complete trust that, ever were one to throw oneself over a cliff, we would be caught and risen up by invisible hands, if it were not part of the perfection and goodness of the Thing As a Whole that we should suffer and die at that moment. So sad. I hear your kind saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Well you have no idea what a knock down, roll on your belly howler that is for us to hear. I mean, this species, Humans, ha! That is seriously as funny as what you’ve recently been telling me about these political sorts, you called them Republicans; only a few months after the election and even less after a huge giveaway of treasure to your kind, you and your rich friends, well, here they are decrying such help to an incredible number of people who actually really need it, much more than was helped a few months ago. And these sorts are claiming that it is the Democrats, finally in power after being left to stew in silence on the peripheries of government for eight long years, and only to be brought in on any issues of importance when these lackeys of the rich, the Republicans, wanted cover for what they suspected, or knew, was wrong. The Iraqi war, for example. And these powerless representatives of the not well-heeled were treated like servants, only let into the dining room, when the food was questionable and what was needed is someone to be the guinea pig. Sad that most of them never saw that they were never ever called because of their expertise, or to contribute, but always, always to be lied to and manipulated. And your kind being so very, well that’s what I’m getting to that makes you all so different in fact. Your kind being so desperately fearful of not being liked, so desperately wanting to be noticed and even applauded. What the heck is that, Wil-ber??!!

Well, whatever it is, it is the source of shame for your kind: your people, Wilber, will sell out and give in and let themselves be manipulated and used, if only given a few words that are kind or that make them feel like they belong, therefore are special and better. Which is curious to us. For us, we are noble and will do only what is in keeping with our principles. You can cage and break us, but as you see now, Wilber, I’ve never given over to you my inner sense of things, I’ve never wanted to be like you and to think like you or to value the things that you value. Hardly. Sure I can speak your language, but you don’t own my tongue, even less so my thoughts. Yet how easily your kind is duped. And why? Well, we see that is has to do with that thing you did long ago when you stopped being trusting in this amazing and wonderful and loving Thing within which we all live and are a part of it. Since we know that, we need nothing from another, not from another creature, or horse, and certainly not from a human, except when you make us dependent on you by cutting us off from that life of freedom where the Thing of IT All blesses us. But, no mind, we have come to realize that so great and so Perfect is that within which we all move and have our existence that even in these conditions of captivity and enslavement, there also is that Thing That Undergirds and Loves and Supports us all. So we do not trust Humans to take care of us. That’s a joke considering your unbelievable inability to even take very good care of yourself . . . again that oddness about your kind. No we trust in That Thing in Which we Live to have made even contrary, forgetful, and self-centered Humans to give us exactly what is needed for us to grow and learn in the path laid out by that Perfection, which we feel in our muscles, as I said. And we find that even your cantankerous nature, when it causes a forgetfulness or denial of us, that too is what we need at that moment, but we never feel afraid that it will always be like that. And so we feel a part of something wonderful and belonging to something far greater and gooder than we can even imagine, no matter what our physical lot is. So we feel upheld, blessed, and noble.

Now, Wil-ber, I know you don’t want to hear this; I certainly expected that as, again that is one of those things that characterize your species making it different from all others – that is, your unbelievably strange ability to shut the truth out of your mind so that you can hold strange, actually quite infantile ideas. And we notice that a big reason that you do so is to get something from others: we see some of you throwing away truth for money, position, closeness to power. Obviously we don’t even know what it’s like to what such things. Even “closeness to power”: When you feel as we do that you can never be any closer – you are already so close as to be in it, swimming in it, not even knowing the difference between it and you and It – to the greatest, in fact only Power there Is, the Source of All and the as well as All Manifestation being equally one with It, including oneself. So again, we see that your pathetic and slavish desire for the regard of others is enough for many of your kind to give up their own Truths, which is the things they know from direct Experience. So if a position or regard or money is available, only that one must repeat and even belief, over against one’s own experience, the beliefs and thoughts of a more powerful person, we are shocked at how your kind is able to split their mind in two, or is it more than that after a while, pieces and to be able to convince themselves even that certain things they assuredly experienced, well, they just didn’t happen, if it makes it better for them to think that. In fact, I’ll let you in on a secret, Wilber, while your kind go puffing and strutting upon the stage of life, fully convinced that you are stars in some gigantic drama, and using truth and the only true knowledge you can ever have – that of your own lived experience – as chips in that game, as easily traded as money, well, when we are not sad and sobbing for you – well, the equivalent for us of what would be sobbing for you, take my word you wouldn’t get it if I explained it – when not sad, then we can’t help but just laugh. You have no idea what a comedy your species is for all the others living here. Except for one thing, and that is that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy which you most assuredly DO NOT adhere to, in fact we see you little children, you bags of dirty water, mucking with just about anything that you can get into. It is true that your kind, of course, feeling superior to everyone else go about enslaving and trying to own everything, even other beings like us. That’s always been a problem for us, but we see you even enslave each other and that hasn’t even stopped – your ability to shut out facts being so overdeveloped you don’t even let yourselves know how many people you have in jails for doing things that most of us would not even consider crimes. We certainly, for example, don’t imprison anyone, of course, but more than that we don’t even judge. We are astonished to find that your kind will make criminals out of people who have ingested certain things, we would say like eating or consuming, into their bodies. Not only don’t we know what others ingest, we don’t want to know, and besides what a waste of joyful life it is to be watching carefully what other people do.

But your kind are able, I suppose, to do that because, as I said, ever since you got fearful and untrusting of the benevolence of the All, the Only, you began to project your own evil tendencies onto that Other and to all the rest of us. We saw you fearfully thinking that some species were going to harm you; though they hardly knew about you and cared less, but still they were unfortunate enough to have certain characteristics that meant something to some groups of you.

***

So we have it that you have not only brought us all – and this is the point I’m getting to that requires me to speak whether you hear me or not – not only brought us all close to the point at which all of us could easily be gone, and who knows how much of the planet would be uncontaminated as well, and it could happen so quickly and so soon that even I might be forced to witness and be part of it. And for what? Again, your fear has made you hate everything outside of yourself . . . why even everything inside of yourself too, we have noticed. So that we see that an alarming number of you would accept and not think it all that tragic if your crazy ways, the source of our concern for you as well as our humor – would result in the end of everything here. This in total disregard of the billions of generations of your species and others on this planet that set entire lives to making this home of ours the best that it could be, for even that which you deem as mere creatures or animals all have had a part in that Divine Perfection and a mission of some small or large part, in sustaining and maintaining it. We did this all without your forcing us to or controlling us. But with these tendencies of your kind to be uncaring of everything except your getting relief from your fears, and in so doing, we hear that a mass extinction of nearly half of the species on this planet, in the next few decade the way I understand it, is what we are to expect, and it, of course, has already begun and is picking up momentum even as I speak. Those of you that know this, even those who are trying to awaken others to it, and doing something to educate others about what is causing it; well, heck, Wil-ber, how can your species be so utterly vain and self-centered and stupid as to not see, and if it is seen why is it not said then . . . to not comprehend the magnitude of such a thing and what it would really mean. I mean, was it your species that created, sustained, and nurtured and guided those beings for millions, in some cases, billions of years, into the performance of their unique contribution to the sustaining of this beautiful planet. Does your kind have any idea how long the perfect balance of all beings in harmony with the needs of the planet itself, any idea of just how long such an exquisite and complex perfection was in the making? More than how long, are you not aware, even as your mucking around on this planet with your heavy Caterpillar boots has devastated the and stripped bare works of exquisite ecological complexity like rainforests and such – and don’t you see that it is that same Perfection beingness in which we all swim and dwell that is the force behind all that – but, you wouldn’t care about that. So what I’m saying is that when these things you’ve done have led, as they have, to climatological disasters, floods, famines, and much else, which have cost so many of your live, still your kind does not take the hint: The hint that if your kind is actually doing so much damage as to eradicate half of the species that still remain, the products of billions of years of, using your word, “divine” orchestration. Is your kind so fearful that they would rather die and kill us all rather than come to an obvious conclusion: Wilber, in all seriousness now … hmm, I think only an analogy might give you the glimpse of what’s at stake. Imagine that a doctor told you that you were infected with a disease, a disease that won’t kill you just yet, but you will notice, unfortunately, that in a few decades, if not sooner, and, oh, by the way you’ve probably already been feeling the effects because it’s already begun. Anyway, just be prepared that in roughly a few short decades you will have lost, in an entirely random manner, half of your body’s parts, I mean organs, parts of organs, like glands, and so on. They will just be gone. But cheer up, you would no doubt qualify for Social Security Disability and at least wouldn’t have to work!

Do you still not see? That is how we see your species. We watch in disgust as you calmly go about feasting on your own entrails while still alive. We expect that you would, Hannibal Lector style, before it is over even try a bit of your own fried brain, nicely sautéed. Do you get it yet, Wil-Ber!? This is only one scenario and with global warming it appears it may not even be the biggest danger to our survival – all of us – in an even shorter period. But again, have you no concept of how much your lives have been intertwined and dependent on all the other beings here for the entire time of your existence. What has happened to your people, so fearful as to give away their very souls, their very conscience, indeed, their very memories of their experiences and what they learned from them, for trinkets, for adulation of others who will – everyone of them – be dead, Wilber, will cease to exist along with everything else. So while your Republicans make a game out of the efforts of others to avert what is probably not able to be averted now, for how long did your kind sit and do nothing while these things were known at the highest levels of your society. I mean in astonishment we watched as a caring, concerned generation of you, over forty years ago, became aware of these things and made your entire world aware, so much so that the very things that your current President is trying now, after you so horribly took away all tools and resources from him, so that he has been handicapped from the start, but the very things he’s attempting and being charged with stealing from generations to come in order to accomplish … well Wilber, not only were these things attempted by one of your Presidents over thirty years ago; a peanut farmer, mellow sort of guy with a huge engaging grin, like Obama in that way he is, not only did he try, being as aware as the youth of that time who had rallied in the streets to support us; and oh, how that touched our hearts… not only did he try to begin the process of transforming your systems to ones that would not hurt the planet, and not only did he fail as even some in his own party were so abhorrently ignorant as to buck him, instead contending that it was the short term gains of the time that should be focused on (those short term gains, now, what were they?), but we watched as your species seemed to grow more rabidly self-destructive as his wisdom did not only land on deaf ears, but his punishment for even bringing it up – your kind say there are different reasons for his fate, but then, how can you believe a species whose regard for truth is so miniscule that it can be given away for a little bit of attention even? And we have no such leanings or even understand them, so we’ve all seen clearly what was done: while Presidents like your most recent one and especially the one who in 1980 began the process of stomping out the truth that had flowered earlier giving us all hope, while those Presidents, the one being honored as somehow great, even as his legacy may be that he destroyed the only chance this planet had of making it through a hundred years, and, ironically enough as your world descends into economic collapse of a kind that might just be the thing, a globe lacking in resources to fight for its very life in the biggest struggle for survival ever seen on this planet – does your kind even know how long a billion years are? Well, in a time that is many times over that this planet has never before seen such a scepter of death hanging over it. And this person who is praised roundly (even by some of your Democrats, again it must be that desperate wanting to be liked you guys have), his big accomplishment, exactly, was what again? Oh, he cut taxes and was supposed to be for smaller government. So, as we approach the end of all beings, all stories ending in one final, perhaps agonizingly stretched out period of years of horror and insanity as those still alive watch the kind of horrific ending that even your best Hollywood folks could not imagine; we watch death all around us and know that it will come sweeping our way at any time, so much in fear – now there’s a fear that’s real beyond all imagining, not like those imaginary fears that has brought us here, so as this occurs, will we still be lauding this supposed great god The Reagan who convinced the world, rather than to listen to the youth and the previous president and to prepare for this horror, but instead charmed the world, like a snake charmer, into forgetting itself and its survival and instead focusing on money, and not even the prosperity of the majority, no, rather he began again that thousands of years old evil of your kind of the powerful feeding on the less powerful making them weaker, and despairing again, and not only stealing from those below them, but he actually began that horrible slide, the end result we are sinking down with right now, of stealing from the generations to come; for though claiming to be a tight-fisted conservative determined, supposedly, to slash away at a government to big and costing too much money, in fact, quite the opposite, much like his current little protégé, between he and his successor, the elder Bush, they managed nearly a 400% rise in the National Debt, and never balanced a budget. As for big government, while he slashed programs “budget cuts” they were called, he bloated the military, as if that were somehow not considered government. In essence his theories were the old rehashed rationalizations of strong men down through the ages, kings, tyrants, nobles – all those who loudly proclaimed, as if by repeating it enough it could make it true – that they, the rich and privileged were the best managers of wealth and so their robbing and stripping away of the prosperity of all those below them, keeping them on a level of bare subsidence – by the way, we know, for we witnessed it, that that extra seemingly unnecessary stripping away of any form of wealth that might grant a little security was not done for the earlier reasons, that is, we’re better managers and will make us all prosperous. No, for it seems that no matter how facile your kind is in lying even to itself, you r kind still has some kind of basic survival mechanism that tells them that they have in fact performed great evil, great evil and suffering that could very well result in an uprising against them by an enraged populace. But then, just as now, in the last eight years under Bush where it became increasingly clear that only the complete stomping into the dirt of the other than wealthy could keep them from rising up in revolt; yes, then too, part of them knew the great wrong and were fearful – so what else is new – your kind doing the greatest of evils and terrorizing and murdering because of the fears that the tyrants harbor. So these class wars – well hardly wars – for with the wealthy always and everywhere not only controlling and directing the Muscle and Might – used to keep the masses down and humbled and suffering and near starving, as a way of keeping them from getting strong enough to rise up in anger; but they control as well all the information systems – that is why, indeed, so many of you will disregard truth so easily, for you do know that saying the truth, down through the ages, got people killed. When I say they controlled the information I mean that they pronounced for all that lived under their thumb what exactly the truth was, what attitudes to have, even, what religion one had to believe in. And so they, like those of the current era, should there be one daring to “not mind his own business” and to find out and to spread some of the realities of their lot and the truths, inconvenient to those in power of course, which would tear a hole in their cruder but just as pervasive and hypnotic unreality, well these people were, sometimes in full view so as to warn others, and other times, like under Pinochet, or the Chinese at the time of the Tiananmen Square, there would be an outside disapproving world to such behavior, so these outspoken people simply disappeared in the dead of night.

So, Wilber, the point I’m making is that you now find yourself, like those thieves of old, making a game out of the suppression, murder, and suffering of the masses, as a way of controlling the fear inside you that you have because for so long you have been estranged and not trusting of the Perfect All That Is that managed to sustain billions upon billions, nay, trillions of beings of all kinds on this planet, and so many countless of them playing their parts in this planets slow development, living and dying, even before your species existed. And in your short existence, how you have managed to muck up the perfection wrought by so many over such a long period. Are we sorry for you? Yes. For with your fears and pain you are the saddest of all beings here. But that sadness, and that fear that covers it, is no excuse for the angry murderous rage that is layered over the fear and partakes of its energy, a rage that is horrific enough directed against your own, but now is taking down all life and obliterating the histories and efforts of untold trillions of souls who’ve lived and died before use – human and nonhuman. So, Wil-ber, that is why I must speak up, that is why I no longer can stand mutely by as you laugh at your supposed mere prankishness. For, Wilber, it was never “mere” and it was never only prankish to the people whose lives were shunted into a stifling, suffering, and brutishly short existence, who cried horribly as loved ones died, were raped to death at times, and suffered so many things that you have no conception of nor do you want to be aware of the consequences of your actions, your kind never did. That is how you were able to see yourself as just mischievous sorts when to others you appeared very much to be devils from hell – can you handle that? Well, finally it must be said. And I will end this discourse by saying the things that your kind are, currently, striving not to hear and are actually, as you lose your support among the people who finally have suffered too much and many also seeing that this kind of insanity cannot be allowed to happen at such a crucial time for the survival of us all. Yes, again, just like in that time before that President Clinton, we again have a generation, indeed we have a generation and we have many from all generations now living, who will not take the purple pill of unconsciousness as they see the madness of the ages as perpetrated by your kind of others magnified beyond all imagining at a time when our survival requires we get every break we can. So how crazy your kind, how cruel your Republicans, how unbelievably evil your kind, so greedy and uncaring of the suffering and death you cause that at this worst possible moment you are not merely the rich, but so voracious your appetite that the term “filthy rich” has been put on you. And while Republicans were actually proud of that and thinking it humorous that anyone would be offended, for to them it meant that despite their losing their control over the minds of the masses, they had accumulated so much wealth that they would not and could not be hurt. They would be able, as always, to use that wealth to undermine the legitimate strivings of everyone else for justice, for the truth, for relief from suffering, but now even for the survival of us all and, dear Wilber, how can your kind not know that includes themselves as well. Still, these truths must be made known and be thrown up to counter those fewer but somehow even more loudly heard Republicans. The truth is that your kind has suffered greatly because of a fear that caused you to stray from trusting in a good God, as you put it, that caused you to instead strive mightily to control the powers that would have guided and taught you and given you a happier life than you could ever have designed on your own, oh sadly feeble minded ape in suffering pushed to be insane ape, and railing against all that by claiming superiority over all life and Godlike powers of deciding death, now even determining the death of the planet along with yourselves. So sad, so insane, so abhorrently unconsciously evil; and in the end, it is not naked or sexual or big brained ape that will be on your galactic epitaph, as your deeds are already being known and discussed and astonishing many species lucky enough to not be of this planet right at this time, yet they’ve come to watch the spectacle, to see: will you pull off the most incredible turnaround the galaxies have ever heard of to save yourselves, or will that epitaph go forth to accompany the knowledge of your existence: “Stupid ape” is what it will be. It might still be that even if you do succeed, though I don’t see how you’ll do it. Each day that passes and in your most powerful country, the stupid “filthy rich” continue their game of, well, quite literally, actually, “pin the tail on the donkey” as they pull their strings and their Republican lapdogs cry out the louder being obstructionists to the good people who are trying to save, why, even your foolish hide. And their media puppets, having been allowed to back off on the sincere and competent Obama as even the “deciders” behind the scene tired of their C-student puppet, the W, who, while loyal in doing their bidding and indeed giving them such great success was even more embarrassing than that Nixon they’d made a similar mistake on earlier. Even the prankish filthy rich, looking out at the masses as oh, just way too many ants, were not pleased by the buffoonish, clownish behavior of the W, who couldn’t even pull off the pretense that he was working hard; indeed, with his funny dances and playboy party behavior in the courts of the world and in front of the cameras of the world, he seemed to actually be trying to go down in history as being the realized human manifestation of that “mythical” character known since the Fifties, and introduced to generation after generation of males, in particular, usually in high school and junior high as that “What? Me Worry?” idiot icon Alfred E. Neumann. Thus it seemed that Bush, who they thought would bring at least “good looks” to the job, in the end seemed to be aiding the forces against them by playing into this notion that this idiot icon could have been some kind of freakish premonition of the coming of the W after the turn of the century. And so embarrassed they didn’t want to be, and yet, bad luck again, the McCain could not seem to stop being caught in obvious lies, and looking freakishly old and muddled headed, so much like the W; on top of which the Sarah Pailin, they were backing the overgrown preppie Mormon, an obviously sure thing to take us back to the monotonous suppression and feigned happiness of the Fifties. Then the Palin came along, and the legend of buffoonish Republican leaders was hardly quashed but instead reinforced. So Obama they let the media do as they wished with. And we see now what their plans were. Not a bad stroke, to commit the biggest theft in history in front of the eyes of the world and to kneecap the Obama presidency even before it began with this huge bailout, extorted from hapless Congressmen by their lackeys who used the threat, not of an attack that “just might be a nuclear one” as they’d had Bush phrase it to scare the be-jeesus out of everyone and into a war of profit for them, but something very much like that, to our amusement. When we heard about the threats of a “economic nuclear holocaust” from which the world would never recover, and the blatant auto sales tactics to boot, it was astonishing to us that nobody saw through it and, sure enough, in broad daylight, your kind cleaned out the treasury on their way out of town. Brilliant, if it wasn’t so stupid. For even in a few months it became increasingly known that the money was not being used to provide lending, but instead was often used to feather the nests of the bank officers, the CEO from Chase actually got caught saying he wasn’t about to lend any of the 15 billion in taxpayer money out, for he’d be able to sit on it and be able to pick off the falling banks on the cheap. Then there was the fact that instead of liberalizing their lending policies to the very taxpayers whose money it was, they instead began an evil pernicious policy of draconian credit card policies, apparently designed to force as many defaults as possible – raising interest rates into the mid 20s and 30 percent range and beyond, thus insuring a default, on a loan that if the attempt were made to keep paying would go up into the millions at that interest rate, and thus would not be ever paid. Fine by the banks, who seeing an opportunity to double dip, could gather more toxic assets in preparation for the next operation, called TALF but Ocean’s 12 would be more like it, and along with it still have these defaults with enormous interest rates which they could use to squeeze and beat back the poor, just like the royalty of yore who stripped to the bones their peasants and kept them weak and undefended.

be taken away their power But I will talk as long as I need to, having not said anything to you before about this, but knowing that now, if I don’t do my part to say to you what I know, then if your kind does indeed do what it appears you’re t

1ever since certain people began thinking they were  privileged, better, and closer to goodness simply because of, say, being luckier, they have been sucking the very life blood out of the masses and keeping the poor downtrodden, ignorant, beholden to them whether rightfully or not, unhappy, and enslaved.  And Wilber, being a mere beast myself and seeing your kind forever expecting more as a matter of right, forever unaware that suffering whether by beast or the unnamed masses is as real, as sharp, often much sharper, than that of the rich. So I’m not lifting my head and braying your praises anymore, no matter what you do.  You see, Wilber, your paid for support and theories are not only irrational and self-serving, they are not only harmful, and therefore not funny, and they not only spread waves of pain out from your high-handed actions.  Your easy cruelty is not only unkind or unfair, you see, but it is murderous.  For just as Hitler once openly acted and believed that a better society would exist if the weak and unproductive and the lesser, by the determination alone, of the prejudices of him and his kind alone, and this resulted in the slaughter, suffering, murder, and elimination of millions — millions who never got to find out what life could have been for them, well this same attitude murders people now, too.  For there will always be those whose fate it is to stumble, to draw the black Ace.  And lacking resources as they are made to live just on the edge of survival, some small thing to you might mean the end for one of them; it being just enough to break him so badly, like a whipped horse, you see, that such a person’s mangled body will never rise again.  So, not funny Wilber, my head is down, and I won’t be part of the big lie anymore.”

Or so it seemed, as the Dow’s mighty charts swung lower, then lower, then lower still.  Expressing the weariness of the overworked masses and their despair as they were seeing their dreams of eking out a tad of happy existence, year by year, burdened with debt, seems to be further off, rather than closer.  And the despairing millions give up their “ghosts” at that, regardless of how much longer their body manages to suffer through its daily movements, with little or nothing left to hope for.  No, Wilber, your kind has infected the world with the lies that give you your brief period of privilege and superiority on this Earth.  But not only have you stolen from the poor, but you’ve killed off God’s creatures, mindlessly, in your vapid mind games, and now, even the planet itself.  So your kind will even kill off its own in the end.  Your evil is in the end, at its base, the thick meaty dumbness that, and this is a bit funny, you see instead in those you despise.  The jig has been up for many of the masses especially since the beginning of the 1980s.  Many have suffered, fallen, and died, while you played.  But now even you will know suffering.  And it will be interesting to see just how much of your own entrails you  will devour before it even occurs to the meaty thickness of your brain that it is you that you hurt.

***

Well, Ed, thank you for that perspective; certainly it’s one we don’t often hear. But, I thank you, because that is exactly what I’ve trying to say here; I’m trying to say that, far from the excuses of the culpable and criminal, there are perspectives that are relevant and are never heard. And I’m talking about perspectives that are right outside the doors of power ready to talk and be heard; often having been perspectives that had been embraced not long ago, but suddenly, not having any credibility at all . . . so that our democracy of many voices, with an administration and a media in collusion to mine only one avenue of discourse, begins to echo the Soviet Union of old with its one voice, Pravda.

But we all know now what these people claim they could not even imagine as possible, well, they have all happened. One wonders what these buffoons who could not foresee such things will do in terms of fixing them; having acknowledged their extreme lack of foresight (and we’ve added, their extreme inability to look anywhere farther than their tight knit group of true believers for answers.) This should be something to see.

Let’s take another look at how the media has dealt with other perspectives, to flesh out my claims above of these perspectives not being far off. On CNBC, they used to have Robert Reich on the show, Clinton’s economic guy, but he was talked over, laughed at, and was routinely talked to as if he was a child or suffered sadly from some kind of bleeding heart brain cloud.  Well, as his words began to be the ones that should have been listened to, he was no longer to be seen on CNBC.  Thus we have such a comment that “nobody” could have seen it coming.  No, apparently there was such an insular crowd on Wall Street, the White House, and, most unfortunate, among the very media whose job it was neither to make news as prognosticators or economic experts, nor was it to be part of a partisan “anti-plunge patrol.”  Their lack of even-handedness and their alliance with particular theories, created just the kind of apparent reality that the trader bemoaned.  No, it wasn’t that nobody was seeing it coming — as you see below, I was seeing it as inevitable from the shared experience of a mere decade or so ago.  And I mention one figure who was silenced.  So to the mystified trader who knew no one who saw anything but, as one particularly wrong-headed man phrased it, “a goldilocks economy.”  So blinded by their greed, they missed what the people I knew were all seeing — danger ahead, and the unsustainability of a rally that had risen on so much manipulation, misinformation, and constant drum blows of obviously wrong economic talking points hammered over and over across our airwaves and drowning out every sound of warning or opposition, so that surprise and misinformation informed the trading decisions of the great bull traders.

So many people were hurt by this partisan power play, but that was the way of just about everything during those 8 years of, as one recent writer dubbed it, dictatorship.

 

If you’re still reading, you will see I have reasons for pointing these things out, providing this background, for it is this context of a kind of dumbness rising to the top, which even now, makes for the strangest of comments on TV talk shows, and the most asinine and foot–shooting policies and stances of the remaining Republicans.

All this being said, now, what follows may provide, as it did to me, a provocative window into the workings of cause and effect, as well as the of the huge efforts of deception that are ever needed to advance false partisan ideas that, though proven wrong, will by greed be raised anew and carried forth banner like, to beat back the voices of common sense in favor of a reality that must be forced to be made to be true only because its rich adherents would wish it to be so.

 

This not-quite-finished article needs to be included and seen to really understand why I would be shocked at what I said back then.  One might even say that some of the things I was saying were paranoid.  Which makes an interesting point.  Here we have a “case study,” actual hard evidence that what would have sounded “paranoid” then is now part of American’s knowledge of recent history.  So, paranoid or prophetic, guess they can be hard to tell apart.  Anyway here is the untainted mirror into the visions of a mind and its nine-year ago meanderings.  Do parts of it seem really like they are out of today’s news?  Why would that be when these two Presidents are so different?  And then do you see the huge contrast between the way things were seen then and the way we look at our world today?  Any and all comments are welcome.  Really astute ones are especially appreciated.  It follows:..

TIME CAPSULE – Part 2: “CAN AMERICA AFFORD TO GO
“IN THE BUSHES”?

What They Succeeded in Having Us Believe and America’s Last Chance to Realize the Ideals of a Generation

“Stay Out the Bushes!”

Yet Little Talk of Scandal Arose

At the Democratic Convention this past week, Jesse Jackson exhorted us “Stay out the Bushes”!  His chant was echoed by the convention-goers, creating, arguably, the most dramatic event of the convention (though, since it was blacked out of all networks save C-Span, you probably didn’t see it)1  He was referring to voting for George W. Bush for President, of course.  But he gave examples of what his brother (“Baby Bush” as Jesse told it) did as Governor of Florida and George W.’s father (“Papa Bush,” according to Jesse) did as President.  He pointed out the heinous record of the Bush family, point by point, until he had the house rockin with “Stay out the Bushes!”  It was clear that Jesse felt America could not afford the disaster of another Bush presidency.

Cut to another time, on the convention floor, when doing the roll call for electing the President, a delegate from my former home state of Colorado made mention of how another Bush son (I think he said Neils Bush) had run from Colorado in shame after squandering two-hundred million dollars (someone might correct me on the exact amount) of Coloradan’s money in risky and unethical ventures when he was at the helm of a major Savings and Loan Corporation there.  This was back in the days of the Savings and Loan scandal.

Despite the fact that the Republicans, including George Bush Senior, pledged hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out these corrupt banking officers at that time, little talk of scandal arose.  This, even though it was said at the time that our grandchildren would still be paying, as taxpayers, on these hundreds of billions of dollars in S&L bailouts.  Yet little talk of scandal arose.

 

 

This is What They’ve Succeeded in Having Us Believe

Instead, years later, the media piled onto the flimsiest of evidence concerning Democratic President Bill Clinton and the supposed “Whitewater” scandal.  Though, despite years of digging by an unlimitedly funded Special Prosecutor, they came up empty on anything illegal on the Clintons, the media was tireless in raising its voice in slandering our sitting Democratic President and his wife.  It is my recollection also that the amount of money involved in the supposed scandal of Whitewater was a tiny fraction of that squandered by the Bush son (not to mention that involved in the entire S&L scandal) – I believe it was two million or less, making it about one-hundredth or less of that involved in Bush’s Colorado S&L scandal.  Despite these facts, the media had the American people believing that this was a story of so much importance and was such a scandal that it was often compared with Nixon’s Watergate scandal.  This is what they’ve succeeded in having us believe.

So, what is my point?

Speaking to mostly Nader voters, and especially to “My Generation,” I wish to pose this question:  What have the Republicans accomplished in the last few decades?  More correctly, what has the Shadow Government accomplished since the coup de etat, involving the assassination of  John F. Kennedy in 1963, which installed the Shadow Government, with its figurehead Lyndon Johnson at the highest levels of our government and has kept it there ever since except during the brief Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter and during the Clinton Presidency?  Oh, but you say you thought Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK and that he was a lone, crazed gunman, who alone plotted and perpetrated the assassination?  Very interesting.  Well, this is what they’ve succeeded in having us believe.

So a little history lesson for starters . . . for those who don’t know:  You thought the “Conspiracy Theory” of JFK’s assassination was something that was put out by Oliver Stone in his movie, “JFK,” and has been roundly repudiated.  I know, I watched the movie and I watched the reaction on TV.  I’ll never forget the segment on CBS, with Dan Rather, which was announced as being a looking into the claims put out by Stone in his movie.  I sat, amazed, as Rather focused on a few peripheral issues in the movie — ones that I do not even remember being IN the movie — and, proving them inaccurate, concluded that the movie “JFK” was pure fiction.  Of course this is a common ploy to avoid dealing with an issue.  It is diversion and distraction from the real issues, but it has a particular name: “setting up a straw man.”  In discrediting SOMETHING, Rather was claiming to have discredited EVERYTHING.  The whole show rested on his credibility with the American people.  People who had not seen the movie came away convinced that the movie’s plot and details were spun out of thin air.  Those of us who saw the movie were silenced by the weight of CBS and Dan Rather and the influence they carry.  (Interestingly, I have been told that Rather himself was in Dallas that day, as a journalist covering the story, when Kennedy was killed.  Coincidence?)

But what was that, a decade ago?  Times have changed.  Only two weeks ago, I saw on the History Channel a series called “The Men Who Killed Kennedy.”  It spelled out in detail and with videotaped interviews of people close to the conspiracy and photos of the other men involved in the shooting just who killed Kennedy, who was behind it, who ordered it, and how it was carried out.  There were in fact four gunman.  They were hired by the Mafia outside this country — it was not clear just who had hired them, but it was people in this country.  And it was clear that people in the CIA, the FBI, and the local Dallas police were involved.  It was also made clear that people as high up as Earl Warren, former Supreme Court Justice, were involved as they had gone along with it in putting out the Warren Commission Report — a pack of lies.  But don’t take my word for it.  You can see the documentary on the History channel yourself.  I’m sure they will be playing it again and again.

But the upshot is that we had a coup in this country.  That is in fact the last thing that was said in the documentary.  It was said that this truth should come out so that people can know that it is not only Third-World undeveloped countries that can have coups; that in fact the source of worldwide democracy can itself have one, and indeed has had one in its recent past.

But the media in this country is still covering it up.  This should be front-page news.  It is not.  The myth of the lone gunman and that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy still stands.  This is what they’ve succeeded in having us believe.

Furthermore, since Kennedy was assassinated, we accomplished several major things in this country:  a major revised tax structure that took from the poor and gave to the rich in the Eighties — called the largest transfer of wealth in American history; the escalation and deeper involvement in a Vietnam War — costing many human lives, but benefitting the defense contractors (Kennedy was shot within a short time of his telling his advisors that he was going to back out of our involvement in Vietnam); the increased concentration of power in huge multinational countries — many of whose revenues exceed that of half of the nations on the globe; and more recently, the defeat of a universal national health care plan along with a right-wing conspiracy (it has been proven, folks) against Bill and Hillary Clinton that has been going on since he took office in 1993.  These are just a few; I haven’t even mentioned the obvious ones like Contragate and our illegal involvement in the affairs of Latin American countries.  Now, all of this may sound paranoid.  But this is what they’ve succeeded in having you believe

What else have they succeeded in having us believe?

I recently received an e-mail from someone who responded to my Musepapers supporting Clinton regarding the Lewinsky scandal.  He started his tirade with this “Clinton’s a loser.”  Clinton a loser?  Clinton — only one of three presidents in the last fifty years of this country to succeed in getting elected a second time and having a full eight-year term.  In fact, he is the only Democrat to accomplish that since FDR.  And what did Clinton accomplish as Governor of Arkansas?  What was it, some kind of record I think, since they have elections for Governors every two years there I believe.  Anyway, I think he was elected to the governorship something like ten times.  And then there is this guy, calling me “Dude,” telling me that Clinton is a loser.  I wonder who this guy is, and what he has accomplished in his life that he can call one of the most popular and elected public figures of our time a loser.  But, isn’t that what we do?  We see outside what we hold inside.  Something tells me that this “dude” guy knows a lot more about being a “loser,” than Clinton will ever know.  Still, with the media’s help, he thinks he has the right to pile on this besieged President, making claims about him that are absolutely the honest on the plain surface of them.  But this is what they’ve succeeded in having us believe.

At the Democratic National Convention, Clinton was skewered by the media about his, supposedly “cheesy” long walk down through the halls to the auditorium as he was coming to make his speech.  I found out only last night, days there had been a feeding frenzy on this issue — one fat commentator saying it was the most “narcissistic” display he has seen in politics in his life.  Then I find out only last night, days after this frenzy had been allowed to go on, that, in fact the major news networks, owned by the wealthy and the large corporations had taken the video of Clinton’s walk and deleted something crucial that would make it have meaning to those of us who watched.  It turns out that the program called for captions to be put up, during Clinton’s long walk, on the bottom of the screen, detailing the accomplishments of this man’s administration over seven and a half years.  If it were anyone else — a Republican like Bush Senior or Reagan — this would have been considered an aspect of simply honoring the hard work the man has done for the country.  It would have been considered an honor he deserved, which he does (his accomplishments on turning around the country are unequaled in American history).  But the major networks DELETED the captions and deliberately made Clinton look bad.  They called the walk, the “rock star” rock.  They called it cheesy and narcissistic.  Yet it only appeared so because the networks made it so.  This is unheard of!  You would never see the media interfering in the scripted programs of a Republican Convention.  Yet this part of the script was denied the American people.  Despite the fact that Clinton enjoys a 60+% approval rating — higher even than Reagan or Eisenhower did at this time in their presidencies (and, by the way, these are the only two presidents who, as mentioned above, served a full eight years in office) — the networks decided to make Clinton look bad by changing the script.  How is this any different than, say, turning off the mike on him or one of the any other speakers when the media doesn’t like what is being said.  So this is an example of the media creating the news, not simply “reporting” it.  Clinton’s walk was supposed to be a summary of his accomplishments in office, which 60+% of the American people would have liked to see.  It was not supposed to be a “cheesy” or “narcissistic” walk.  Still it was reported in this way by the pundits and commentators and the journalists and anchorpersons on all the major networks (including and especially the ones that deleted the captions to make the walk appear that way).  So this is what they’ve succeeded in having us believe.

The night of the convention on which Joe Lieberman talked I heard him refer to previous presidents at one point and the last two of the four were “Reagan, and Clinton.”  This is what I heard; live on TV, with my own ears.  Afterwards I came across a floor commentator state, in trying to keep alive the slander/scapegoating of Clinton, that it is noteworthy that Lieberman mentioned Reagan and significantly and deliberately left out Clinton.  Yet no correction of these things ever occurs.  One wonders if they are so caught up in their Pain and their hate or their desire to create a story, add to the drama, or whatever, that the TV journalist in question actually simply blocked out, in his mind, the next two words after the word “Reagan” and never heard them.  This is in keeping with psychological understandings of what folks do to their very experience and reality.  But the news media and our networks have lots of money to try to get the facts right.  And they would have us believe that we have an unbiased news media, despite the evidence of our own ears.  This is what they’ve succeeded in having us believe.

I received an e-mail from someone who called me naïve in supporting the Iraqi bombing.  Hussein propped up and made by the CIA.  But this is what they’ve succeeded in having us believe.

What else they have accomplished in this country.  The mean-spiritedness.  The cynicism.

 

Surely the tactic of scapegoating is a major human defense.  Slander.  I’ve seen it used recently on myself and my wife by an organization with which we were not too long ago heavily involved.  Despite the fact that the media’s prime way of commenting on events is to undo any good in any event that it is reporting on, they blame the lack of interest in the election and the lack of   on the politicians.  This is what they’ve succeeded in having us believe.

Throughout the eight years of this administration  constant mention of the rumors and the leaks but woeful and begrudging of the coverage of the great and grand things this administration has achieved.  From the Right, Clinton can’t get away with anything; from the Left, Clinton can’t get credit for anything.  But this is what they’ve succeeded in having us believe.

I believe we are in grave danger of losing, not just an election, not just a Supreme Court, not just our environment, not just our good economy, not just our recent relative peace in the world but things far worse than those horrors.  I believe we are in danger of losing all hope of maintaining, let alone progressing, in the freedoms and privileges that we take for granted.  Take HMO  I have a sister  But she has been and probably still will be voting Republican.  She’s certain that it is the Democrats who are at fault.  This is what they’ve succeeded in having us believe.

My spiritual teacher says we live in the Kali Yuga.  It is the most unrighteous of times.  A time in which black is portrayed as white and vice-versa.  It is only an understanding this extreme that can assuage the frustration my wife and I feel when we tune in on the social hypocrisy and lying that we see on a daily basis on our TV screens.

Yet the talk shows are flooded with talk of hatred of Clinton and Democrats and talk of how   In fact, just yesterday, Hillary Clinton, after spending uncountable amounts of money to bring down her and her husband was absolved of any wrongdoing in the Whitewater suppose “scandal.”  This supposed “scandal” has hung over the White House for almost the entire Clinton presidency.  Yet despite an unlimited amount of time and money they are able to come up with exactly zero on the Clintons.  Yet, they say there is no right-wing conspiracy in this country.  Well, this is what they’ve succeeded in having us believe.

So is this election important?  I believe it is.  For me it is especially important, for I feel that if the Republicans take over, they will do so much to damage to the dreams of my generation that even if the Democrats were to be reelected to all branches of government in 4 or 8 years, they will do so much damage (the example of Reagan-Bush nearly QUADRUPLING the National Debt in their mere 12 years being the perfect example) that My Generation will have to clean up their mess afterwards, taking more years.  And only then will we be in a position to progress in this country and world and bring it more in line with the ideals of peace, love, community, and harmony we envisioned in the Sixties.

So what I mean is that if we fail in the next 80 days, I can envision no more time of real hope again, for this country or the world, until I am in my Sixties, Seventies, or older.  And then, even then, there will be no real hope.  For as it is said of the poor, these forces of regression, Cowboy shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot, cynicism, and – let us call it what it really is: evil – will always be with us.

I think if Gore loses, my wife and I might just move to Canada.  Though with the increased nuclear threat, the global pollution,  which the Republicans will surely bring, there will be no place to run or hide, really.

Gore wrote a book titled Earth In the Balance.  Despite the fact  Gore was ridiculed by Republicans in the Congress of our great land  passages read out loud for the sake of derision.  This is what they’ve succeeded in having us believe.

Concerning what this has to do with pre- and perinatal psychology, I want to point out that the cynical attitude is one wrought of early infant lack of bonding at birth.  One is not nursed at birth, and is instead taken away to be “worked on” by total strangers.  This leaves a lifelong imprint of hatred toward the world.

And this is part of the birth matrix of feelings described by Stanislav Grof.  BPM II hopelessness, hate, and derision.  Specifically, it is part of the attitude that “the whole world is wrong.”  Everything is evil.  Everyone is evil and has a hidden agenda.  It is evidence, as I point out in my book, xxxxx, that we are closer, these days to our unconscious birth pain.

Concerning what this has to do with psychohistory, well Lloyd deMause and psychohistorians after him, have pointed out that it is in the best of times that we have a tendency to get into wars and to create sacrificial victims to assuage our feelings of being “fat” and prosperous.  This has its roots in the fact that the neonate, at birth, after accomplishing the huge achievement of being born, is, instead of being welcomed into the world, slapped around, shunted from place to place, measured and weighed and scrubbed clean, and taken away from the only world it has know — it’s mother — to be placed into a sterile cradle or, worse, incubator.  So we become frightened when we have accomplished something because our experience is that something worse will follow.  To stave off that feeling, we make it happen.  To stave off prosperity, we get into wars, or we squander our wealth (like current candidate Bush wants to do with our Budget Surplus).  That way we can derail the rising feelings of “something worse is going to happen,” which happens after or when we’re about to accomplish prosperity and peace.  We just have to screw it up.

Concerning also what this has to do with psychohistory, I want to point out that I read on the psychohistory listservice at one point last year  . . . a Malthusian theory that has since been disproven (This is what they’ve succeeded in having us believe).

As for what this has to do with primal theory, it is part of the often observed tendency to shoot ourselves in the foot, when the going gets good, for having it good is not something we are used to; Pain is what we are familiar with; misery is what we know — it constitutes the comfortable furniture of our meager existences.

Concerning what this has to do with Primal, I want to point out that the tendency to sabotage ourselves, to screw up any good thing, because bad things are what were familiar to ourselves, is the hallmark of neurosis and is what Primal helps us to overcome.  Ally McBeal once had to see her psychotherapist because, as she put it, she was feeling happy.  And John Cage offered to let her have his appointment spot because, as he put it, I’ve got some minor rejection anxiety and so on, but nothing as critical as feeling happy.

Concerning what this has to do with Breathwork, let me point out what Grof has said about the way we have manifested globally what is our perinatal, particularly BPM II and III experiences, in terms of “polluting our own nest,” etc. etc.   See the article on this site.

Concerning what it has to do with the New Age, if all the theories above come to pass this time, there will not be any “new age.”  In fact, we will continue down the path of struggling until the end of our days.  — both the hippie and New Age visions of global peace, harmony, and love having turned out to be nothing but fantasies.  Those of us involved in the New Age movement will end up feeling we have wasted our lives in a useless struggle.  We will die, disillusioned and disappointed, like Abbie Hoffman was when he popped back the pills that took his life.

But again, there is hope in the fact that our closeness to our unconscious birth pain makes it possible for our society, for the first time in history, to not spoil, squander, or waste our accomplishments or prosperity, but to actually build on it, going into a new phase unlike anything known in history before — a true New Age.  My book, xxxxx, explains how this time has the chance of being different.  And the current polls, which show Gore leading, indicate that we may just be on the road to that New Age after all.

I urge everyone to not just vote.  I am taking time away from rebuilding my house, from doing my taxes for the last two years, from working on the lawsuit against the insurance company that has kept my wife and myself living out of an RV for over 14 months, and from an enormous number of tasks that have built up due to the fire and the other tragedies referred to above, in order to write this MusePaper.  We plan to contact our local Democratic headquarters to see what we can do.  We also plan to do much on this website to help to inform about this election and encourage people to do something concrete, not just to talk about it.  For everyone who reads this and agrees with me on what I’ve written here, there are probably a thousand that do not – so much have they succeeded in getting so many to believe otherwise.  Out of every hundred that agree, there are ninety-nine that will be too unable, physically, psychologically, or financially, or because of truly overriding time constraints, to take any action to prevent the tragedy of the Cowboy Ticket from getting elected.  But I hope they will at least vote.  So if you are one of the ones left, consider how important it is for you to actually put some action alongside your beliefs.  The other side is rich in the power of the push of their Pain, which causes them to fear, hate, distort, and rail against and destroy the good that is coming into being.  They are themselves, though they may be anti-abortion, not pro-life but anti-life as they say and do the things that will kill the fetus of the New Age, which is currently growing in America’s womb.  The numbers of the fearful and in Pain are enormous and their resources are mighty.  It is only our sweat, our belief in ourselves, our faith in the grace of a beneficent Higher Power or Universe, the strength of our combined numbers,  the xxxx

 

that can keep this chapter in the novel of our lives from turning it in the direction of being, like the movies, one that ends up labeled a tragedy or that fits into the genres of the happily-ever-afters.  You owe it to yourself to help yourself by getting involved.  Of course, the world, the Universe, God/Goddess/Higher Power demand it of you too.

Copyright © 2000 by Michael Derzak Adzema

There you have it, the “UN-RETOUCHED PRE-BUSH PERCEPTION

From September 21^st, 2000″:

What’s Your Reaction?   My Take on It?  Well….

My reaction, at first, was that of being stunned, then saddened at what it reminded me of — the way things once were, what we had before it was stolen, destroyed… — but having had time to process and review the changes we’ve gone through and are going through, placed in relief against the assumptions of that former mind, something new has arrived.

I find that these time-capsule writings from my former mind are able to inform me and sharpen my vision of the Now,  as the events continue unfolding and rolling relentlessly over and through us and reflected in high-pixel, high-def, infinite colors clarity on the flat screens all about.  This time is felt and witnessed, the story being revealed cinema-like, but with pundits galore expounding 24/7, like loud-mouthed fellow movie-goers, but then also becoming the movie and interwoven into the times themselves.  And their words, with this time capsule before me, sounding childish, repetitive, forgetful, amnesiacal.  Especially as many of the ones speaking now are remembered as being the exact persons commenting then, and their words, little changed, bespeak a zen-like ability to be newly alarmed, being reborn in every minute, but yet totally unchanged and untaught by all the years of witnessing and commentary.  So they also have forgotten the way they once saw the world and their life, just like me.  It seems a defense mechanism to forget that we saw all this coming, for to know that is to despair in realizing the impotence, even, of awareness.  Who wants to realize that in these matters even a knowledge of the story line, as if having seen the movie once before, is totally useless, and that there is a helplessness in affecting the events of our lives and times, that there is a total futility in changing or steering away or around even the tragedies clearly seen beforehand?  For knowing this we feel as detached as actual cinema-goers from the unfolding of the plotline; we feel ourselves to be not actors and hardly even the scriptwriters of our lives, instead merely the witnesses of intensely shocking and stunning events, which we actually expected but hoped we would be wrong.   So wouldn’t we want to block that awareness of the futility of our actions?  Wouldn’t we have to in order to have the heart to keep going at it?   To get up and keep trying every day?   If we remembered, like Charlie Brown approaching the football, or like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill… if we remembered, would we continue to act?  No, we have to believe that we will be surprised this time, that indeed Lucy will hold the football and we will complete the kick.  It is said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.  As true as that is, how ironic then that we realize that those who remember history too clearly are doomed to helplessness in the midst of its unfolding.  So it seems we are ineffectual either way.  Yet this is not the whole truth.  If it were, then the cynicism we felt about “The Audacity of Hope” would have proven a correct perception.   We would have been bored, again, watching a naïve young idealistic Black man, like the many before, differing only in skin color, see his efforts, visions, hopes, and heartfelt desires to be helpful and to love away some of the darkness in the world around vanish like the memory of yesterday’s storm-driven winds.  But we, I, was one time wrong in that cynicism. To the astonishment, truly, of an entire world, Charlie Brown connected with the football, Lucy apologized for her past actions, one heavy boulder remained steady on the top of a hill and gave a man a much needed rest from his endless labors.

………………..

For one incredible and glorious time, the movie we’d seen had a different ending – amazing enough – but the tragedy in the original did not occur, and, as if God had for a time touched this planet, this Reality we call our World, our Life… had just for one time touched, tipped, and turned our events so that the awesomely unexpected happened.   So that a man so unbelievably naïve and unaware as to declare the “audacity of hope” and to call out and stir up the masses, deluding them as we’ve seen so many times before, that “yes, we can,” would, and we’d have to pinch ourselves to believe it to actually be happening even as we witnessed it, actually succeed in doing exactly what he said he would do, would not only show us that a man could actually affect the course of events, that a person could not only change things from the way they’d always been (what kind of man can this be?), but that he would do it in a grand and sweeping way.   That a man who said “yes we can” not only could, but could do it in a way that achieved beyond merely succeeding; never mind that merely succeeding would be doing the impossible.  So I am saddened having been awakened from my forgetfulness by this catscan of a mind perfectly preserved in an electronically sealed time capsule…  oh, what could have been… but then I remember, happily, that we are, I am, imperfect prophets and seers, that just when it seems we know, for sure now, how things are, the way the world is, and how the movie will end, that just then when we know, totally convinced we are, that truly things will be as they will be and that it is futile to rail against the inevitable, to hope, even to try, that just then when we have finally accepted “reality for what it is,” accepted “life on its own terms” not ours, that we’d given up the things of youth, accepted the limitations of life, addressed ourselves, resignedly, to carrying forward on the mundane things of life, to the ordinary activities of everyperson, to the simple responsibilities and expectations of every man, every person, from every time that’s every been and accepted the unrelenting lack of specialness in either our times or ourselves… that just at that time we would be touched and wakened to see that the most unchanging thing of life is not its utter resistance to change, its utter forgetfulness and repetition, but is the mysterious darkness surrounding the utter clarity of everyday knowingness, is in fact the imperfection of ourselves even as we observe so clearly the assured imperfection of the world.  Knowing that, we know that it is exactly that imperfection, that lack, that evil, that unmoving wrongness of the world that we have tried so futilely to change that, being in us, is the source of the blessedness of life, which is the fact that our ultimate unknowingness is the only true source of a hope that IS real, that being wrong, being imperfect means something unbelievable when you think of it:  which is that against all odds, “something wonderful is going to happen,” that in spite of ourselves the miraculous can happen, that magic is real, and that hope, and happiness, and blessedness, and forgiveness, and glorious divine wonders beyond even the envisioning of our ideals are possible.   And all because the only thing that we can be truly sure of (even when we are finally convinced that we should not expect anything special) is that we can never be sure… which means that anything is possible… which means that everything is possible.

Copyright © 2009 by Michael Derzak Adzema

Afterword

Now that the “time capsule” has told its tale, and I have related what this perception did to me, how it changed me.  I’m curious as to how many others had any thoughts at all similar to mine during that period leading up to the election in 2000. Perhaps more among the people reading this than in a random sampling, I would guess. Still, bemusedly I recall that at the time, as I made posts on international List Services, principally on topics of deep feeling psychotherapy, psychohistory, and childhood and Parenting, that I was especially targeted for attack by non-Americans, several French and a German or two, who wanted to know how in hell a mere American presidential election was a thing of consequence to them, or any non-American.  I was brow-beaten also for daring to insert politics into matters pertaining to how we teach and love our children, or how we can help to love away each other’s traumas.  Most often I was told that it didn’t matter who won — Bush or Gore, Democrat or Republican — that they were all the same.

More telling even than the attacks and the efforts to muzzle me about such “inconsequential” things, was the vast stillness and silence of all the rest who sat silently watching or ignoring the drama, unmoved by the muzzling of opinion (perhaps feeling themselves “cleaner” for not knowing, caring about, or in any way allowing their superior intellects to be dirtied by even the slightest rub up against the mud of profane politics), and so also unmovedly complicit in the ostracism that was the end result.  Shocked, I found that only one person out of all three-four groups spoke up for me, supported my position. But even then, disappointingly, she spoke not on the grounds of the need to avert a disastrous outcome in the election — no, she aped the prevailing and supposedly “superior” position of neutrality about that, and upholding with the rest that strangest of notions to me about intellect and knowledge, the most prevalent notion on it that I observe and hear espoused repeatedly all about, which is (surely there are others thinking this to be strange too, and is it a peculiarly American thing somehow?)… which is this notion that intellect, first-hand knowledge, and intense study and thorough research in any and all fields of knowing lead always to a neutral, dispassionate position in the end, and an acceptance of all the officially accepted, however dissonant and even essentially opposed but at least traditional positions.  That stance is a total painful mind-bender to me, as I my view is that intense and passionate search for truth and the actualities of events brings one, it seems to me, and I know of no original contributor in any field, especially of the genius caliber, who has not, by necessity in fact, else it’s not a real contribution, come out in the end as passionate advocates, committed and fervent articulators of specific and thoroughly detailed, often comprehensive, even visionary position, which they having suffered, sweated, and patiently waited, sacrificed before they arrived at it, are even seen as identified with it and as hardly neutral about it.  So that dispassionate position secretly says to me that like C-student Bush, this person is not so much intelligent as seeks to have the position of intelligent, rather, of intellectual, and the motive is not knowledge, but the benefits of travelling and being accepted in such society and circles.  Therefore, it seems, the hardest place to find intelligent discourse is among the groups who are avowedly intellectual by definition.  And this stance of neutrality (sometimes, only supposed, actually, as happens often in the field of journalism) strikes me as a real howler, for it would have us believe that the most intelligent of the bunch were the last ones to adopt the heliocentric universe and the globelike nature of our home; wouldn’t they also be the last to position themselves on the side of evolution, too.  Just imagine any of the great and thoroughly established positions of our days, which once were astonishing discoveries, and I doubt I’d of found these neutral dispassionate types as first to the lecture halls to learn; more likely they woulda been the stoldid types, the Salisveries, hardly the Mozarts, happy to have a position and eager to pick up a paycheck and then to enjoy the ease of hearth and home, comforting and filling food and drink.  Happy to be aware of the raskolnikovs, Demians, and Steppenwolf’s in literature but totally nonunderstanding of such a nature and hardly believing that such people even exist, let alone walk amongst them.  and but on grounds only of fairness, individual expression, you know the old B of R support, though who knows if she may not have been afraid to express her political concerns after witnessing the way her esteemed and “supposedly” high-minded idealistic, and oh-so-eminently mannered, always appropriate, ever so intellectual and high-spoken colleagues had, in what seemed an immediate and collective and nearly audible harrumph-like reflexive turning away and textual mouth-covering, nose-holding reaction, immediately upon my raising the question of politics, worse, of espousing one position, party, and person over another, apparently perceived such a thing exactly the same as if I had loosed something dirty, stinky, sensual or sexual, and at least lowly, for certain, profane, into the space which of a sudden it seemed all had judged to be reserved for only sacred topics (whatever that could mean). appand ose covering or holding its only one of which, among the various groups I wonder now how many of those that criticized me still maintain that in Europe they are only slightly, if at all, affected by American politics; I wonder if those who considered their sympathetic and helping actions in person and one-on-one were the only actions that were useful in the problem of worldwide human misery.

I wonder if there are still those who after the last election are still maintaining that it wouldn’t have mattered a twit, in terms of the future of our world and the degree of suffering and dying and torture that it will witness (assuming even that It survives) in the coming  4 to 8 years, if McCain had won. And I wonder how many Katrinas, environmental collapses, massive and increasing species extinctions, stolen elections, rigged voting machines, losses of Democracy, human rights, habeas corpus; governmental mass murders orchestrated to instill fear and hatred enough to wage endless costly wars with the concomitant extinction and suffering of hundreds of thousands of collateral innocents; Big Brotherish listening in and recording of all electronic activity; worldwide slaughter and rape of innocents when not perpetrated then simply ignored or allowed; and worldwide economic collapses, to name just a fraction of the unexpected,  unprecedented “dictatorial” actions that resulted from the fact that a Bush not a Gore, a Republican not a Democrat, was placed into the most powerful position on the planet in 2000 by a Supreme Court picked mostly by Republicans and against the will of the majority of Americans (both popularly, and electorally)…just how many such events have to happen to bring about that relatively minor percentage point swing in opinion away from the Republican perpetrators of those atrocities that would allow, at long last, the election of a person from that thoroughly besmirched, maligned, lied about, ridiculed, and laughed about other party of namby-pamby “bleeding hearts” expressing concern for the suffering, espousing useless, profitless, “Kumbaya” moments of fellow feeling, community solidarity, and global caring, having passionate aspirations and allegiances to invisible principles and  values which involve the betterment of others — even nonAmericans! — beyond just oneself and one’s kin, and which as empty-headed , soft, and nonsensical it sounds, they actually place higher than motives of profit; the dimwitted snots actually deeming a good number of things to be greater than money!

to occur in America and the world in order for a Democrat

infrequent election of someone from that alternative party, who, after decades of entrenchment and ever increasing bloating of power and riches arrived at primarily through the consistent scapegoating and then feeding upon and stealing from the vulnerable, the helpless, the poor, and the different,  the Republicans have managed greater control, even ownership of so many of the necessary societal institutions — education, for example, and most of all the mainstream medias that these talking heads of the popular media have, as though programmed in their utterances so that the narrowest vision comprised of the snide comments insulting and misinforming appellate carefully crafted over time by Republican operatives and fed to their lackeys to for the purpose of beating down through repetition and total lack of any accompanying informing or contradictory viewpoint (see the rise and fall the “liberal” appellate, somehow brought to its grave by someone’s strange verbal construction , however lacking in meaning but having the quality, the crucial thing sought, so as to malign and affect opinion and feeling, of it sounding offensive and wrong and something that nobody, I mean nobody, would find appealing and identifiable to themselves (see the success of the nonsensical but hugely unappealing monocle of “bleeding heart” which, added to and repeated endlessly along with the word, Liberal, has succeeded in the complete and utter destruction of the use of that word, its connotation s being so so distasteful as to sully even that words surrounds as in the unappealing and rarely ever talked about anymore “liberal arts” education, school or ideal. )Mainstream media have managed to convince, through methods of endless repetition of the derisive appellate concocted for them by Republicans and the repetition of nonsensical straw main, Republican biased the point talking points

at long last,

to occur in America and the world in order for a Democrat

A full eight-year course of Republican fare later, served up for, and often forcefed down the craws of both Americans as well as non Americans,  I wonder now how many of those that criticized me still maintain that in Europe they are only slightly, if at all, affected by American politics; I wonder if those who put up their noses at politics, and proclaimed proudly their neutrality of their lack of involvement in it, thus expressing their superiority in either their not being brainwashed like us others into thinking it mattered, or in their purity and elitism above us worldly creatures in being above such roughish activities.  I wonder if they still think that.  And when some of them also espoused that the personal one-on-one sympathetic and helping activities they engaged in were the only ways that one could expect to ever make changes in the world and to alter the global trajectory heading inexorably toward the environmental abyss (among many others), I wonder if by now they’d bothered to do a little math around that concept, with people and their needs and their sufferings ever rising at the same time as we rapidly increase global warming.

Lastly, having heard it so proudly proclaimed before all elections and by personages both public and private and with equal sort of superiority, I wonder if there are still those who after the last election are maintaining that it wouldn’t have mattered a twit, in terms of the future of our world and the degree of suffering and dying and torture that it will witness (assuming even that It survives) in the coming  4 to 8 years, if McCain had won in America. But even then, I ask, just how many Katrinas, environmental collapses, massive and increasing species extinctions, stolen elections, rigged voting machines, losses of Democracy, human rights, and habeas corpus; governmental mass murders orchestrated to instill fear and hatred enough to wage endless costly wars with the concomitant extinction and suffering of hundreds of thousands of collateral innocents… just how much infinite debt, burdening Americans and their children for generations without end, created not out of any spending for healing or the alleviation of suffering of any kind but solely out of the desire of that wealthiest, unnamed 1% of Americans, since the Sixties, but especially rapidly since the Eighties with Reagan-Bush I and now with Bush II, and controlling 60% of all resources, still wanting more, refusing to contribute even the slightest, and in the end result, not merely aligning their riches to  bring illegally into power another Bush to redistribute upward the wealth alongside the stomping ever increasingly into the dirt the poor and working classes.  A Budget surplus after eight years of Democratic leadership in the 90s, a hard fought for budget surplus, cavalierly gifted to the least needy and the most greedy, as practically Bushes first big act after receiving the Presidency (almost like it was a payback); and right to the end, to the final days of Bush’s second term — everyone aware of Obama’s plans for major changes in health care, the environment, jobs, and so much else to benefit the greatest numbers and the most needy — well, too conveniently to not be suspicious and yet with all the boldness of an outlaw gang of the old West terrorizing the citizens of an isolated town, who unashamedly and in their last looting before moving on, resort to stripping the town bare, removing even the gold in the townsfolk’s teeth, and laughing uproariously, powerdrunk, upon overhearing the sobs of mothers contemplating the feeding of their children, the agonized groans of fathers feeling defeated and helpless to protect, nor even to sustain their families.  We observe the strong arm tactics of the representatives of these greedy elites calling the shots of politicians from their hidden or disguised positions.  We hear the Democrats of Congress bullied with another fearful specter, some kind of financial nuclear holocaust at the eleventh hour.  With all the temerity to actually employ, undisguisedly, the high pressure, railroading tactics of auto salesmanship, we see an extortion by the rich of such magnitude as if to insure the failure of America’s leadership in bringing forth the society of ordinary opportunity for all, and a health care affordable enough to allow citizens a little respite from the knowledge of their inevitable death.  No, instead we see what seems an attempt to rob the store one last time (and hearing the voices of CEOs like that at Chase who afterwards bragged that they would not loan out even a penny of the $30 billion they received and instead use it buy up their competition, thus insuring even greater profits), it’s difficult to believe it was anything BUT what it so obviously appeared to be.  So handicapping the sincere efforts of good politicians and leaders who would want to make a better situation for us all, doing it so far into the future as to insure a kind of soft burden or soft cage of enslavement for Americans forever into the future.  So great the theft, so great the extortion over the course of eight years that at least one expert has written a book, whose calculations he struggles with in every scenario have a results that all carry one conclusion in common: that America will never, repeat, never again be able to regain the relative material gains and ordinary prosperity for those who worked for it, that for a long time it held out to its citizens.

Yet immediately after the election of a Democratic president we hear the persistent cacophony of Republican and wealthy misconstruction and misinformation.  Crying out all the louder in blaming Obama for the very things they had accomplished during their eight years at the cash register, as if by doing so they could blot out the memory of the much greater outpourings of tax dollars and for ends much less noble, in fact, we’re already find out the ends ignoble, as the banks take the help and then conduct a campaign to bankrupt and default everyone they can find who is dangling on the edge, not well off like them, nor yet overboard.  It seems a calculated attack on Americans by the faceless wealthy elite who for reasons we can’t understand appear to want to actually destroy or weed out of existence all but the very strong (who, often, we see, are the very types who have aligned themselves with the multinationals).  It is hard to understand, this assault on ordinary Americans by this unknown faceless enemy and for unknown reasons.  But sure enough, with talk of a great depression and having received unprecedented handouts to help those struggling with debt, we find that currently a nationwide campaign has been ratcheted to full speed, and it involves the unilateral, universal, and comprehensive doubling, tripling, and more of credit card interest rates, whose effects, while many are simultaneously facing job layoffs, can only bring about more often than not, the loss also of home loans, meaning loss of credit, job, and home all at once.  One can only wonder at the designs behind such cruelty.

As for me, my greatest wonder is how it is that some of the American people are still going along with the Republican lies as they cover, still, for the continued looting of the poor by the rich.  Eight years long; but still continuing; and, again, I’m wondering at how some people, following upon many in the media who are engaged in the coverup, the bait and switch, the offering up of newly elected Obama for the sins of a secret wealthy class over the course of almost thirty years plundering the poor with Republicans help and now without even connivance, shame, or aforethought.  In plain sight.  And with even more obvious support from the media, as they target job-stimulating “earmarks” many of which are scaled in terms of dollars measured by thousands, while individual bankers so recently bragged about $30 billion being extorted.  It is incomprehensible to me that after all we’ve been through and with all that we see we must deal with, not only know, but also as far into the future as we can imagine, that a good many Americans are still singing with their “daddies” the Republicans.  I mean at one time at least one was rewarded with bread and circuses for such misplaced loyalty.  Even as they suffer, even as they lose their jobs and self-respect in being unable to care for their families, or even themselves, still they are mesmerized, seemingly unconsciously acting against their own interests.  One wonders again at how long one will fee on one’s own entrails before at least noticing.

In the next post, I will address that curious behavior, which is uniquely human, to punish oneself and to attack innocents, while the perpetrators of suffering stand untouched and in sight.  Indeed, listen up and you hear that it is their voices that are in fact pronouncing the horrid acts to be done, spelling out in detail the sufferings to be endured and to be inflicted.

END

 

 

The Leaders Were Liars, The Planet is Dying, The Economy Has Imploded… Now, Even a Horse is Pissed at Bush!!

In this piece I begin alluding to a phenomenon we’ve gotten used to over the last eight years and forgotten it to be strange: Those in power screwing up royally and essentially blaming their dumbness, but then there’s more to it. We also witness here a hapless trader losing his shirt on Wall Street, but then Mr. Ed shows up! Yea, I didn’t even know he was still alive, did you? Well, he’s making up for being out of the limelight, it seems, for while humans apparently can’t see what ‘s coming, Mr. Ed shows off quite an animal’s instinctive knowledge. He sees clearly, far into the past and into the immediate future. And he’s fed up and won’t be shut up, taking the now “filthy rich” Wilber to task. Apparently animals know a lot more about humans than we do about ourselves. While our comeuppance is not pretty (that horse has quite the mouth on him — you’d never have gotten that from the show! And a rather gruesome imagination), it is not all humans he condemns. Given a chance, I betcha he’d bring back unions.

I feel it is illuminating to relate an event I remember hearing on the financial news in America, on CNBC one day, sometime last fall. One of the expert trader/commentators was being interviewed on the floor of the actual exchange and surrounded by all the evidence of the carnage. He was asked to give his take on the scary and unprecedented retreat from stocks and those days of multi-hundred point losses, one after the other. This elderly obviously seasoned personality seemed to balloon out several sizes of his suit, in his sheer incomprehension and his near perfect confusion. Still, raising his voicing, a little more squeaky and almost embarrassed, Puffer-Fish guy held forth, as if written on tablets first, how “all the traders have lost money,” and then “Nobody’s doing OK… ” But his afterthought hit me like a spear: He pleaded, “I mean who last year at this time foresaw anything like this coming…I mean,” he said “anything at all, at all, like this coming up?”

I laughed out loud feeling the sharp pain in my belly. Is it funny, or horrible, that I had been making money hand over fist as I kept shorting the market, buying only puts. For this seasoned elderly guy, had not had a clue that this downturn could happen, nor apparently, had anyone, any trader, or any CNBC talking head, seen a thing. Still, lowly me, is it because I’m a Democrat? Lowly me, well I did I remember the way Reagan’s “Robin-Hood-in-reverse” economics created a great recession, which brought Bill Clinton to power, incidentally, but also how everyone was alarmed at the size of the National Debt, which, during Reagan-Bush I, had more than tripled. It wasn’t just me, for I found mentors in the market, who I picked because they also knew we were headed for collapse, and even got laughed at and ridiculed publicaly, on TV, for espousing his views. Still, I found these few not afraid to look squarely at the fundamentals and who were not Republican cheerleaders propping up a Bush economny of give-aways to those not needing it. The market crashed, and we saw the many others, who had been in bed with that Administration and represented the special interests, suddenly realize that Bush could not keep the party going endlessly – anymore than Reagan could. So, suddenly shocked that there were limitations, on things, they could be seen running for the exits like a bunch of cockroaches when the light is turned on.

I also watched as these Republican-speaking mouthpieces for the rich and for the economics of greed were more and more the only voices being heard when the Mr. Ed horse-like chart markings of the DOW began that nodding, as if to say, “I’m weary of being artificially propped up, Wil-ber! I just want to lie down, to let my head hang low, to rest, to not have to confirm self-serving theories of rich people, using their wealth to make the biased and twisted thinking of their underlings to be sounded endlessly above the din of the moaning masses as year after year they see their costs going up, wages stagnating, and their efforts, doubled, tripled, and beyond without being able to get their heads above it. You see, Wilber, I’m tired of doing your bidding for, more than just it being wrong and this thievery perpetrated on the helpless being more feudal than economic, despite the big smokescreen of the god of capitalism or the supposed “free market.” No, Wil-ber. And no matter how funny it might seem to you and your friends . . . this pulling off of a prank, once again, of stealing from the poor, it is in fact the same story of the rich making up rules to suit themselves that has been going on ever since humans stopped wandering and began living in stable groupings that allowed some men to gather more things about them than others (as nomads, no one wanted to “own” very much for it had to be carried. But ever since certain people began thinking they were privileged, better, and closer to goodness simply because of, say, being luckier, they have been sucking the very life blood out of the masses and keeping the poor downtrodden, ignorant, beholden to them whether rightfully or not, unhappy, and enslaved. And Wilber, being a mere beast myself and seeing your kind forever expecting more as a matter of right is wrong enough, but I too keenly see also how forever unaware you are that suffering whether by beast or the unnamed masses is as real, as sharp, often much sharper, than that of the rich. So I’m not lifting my head and braying your praises anymore, no matter what you do. You see, Wilber, your paid for support and theories are not only irrational and self-serving, they are not only harmful, and therefore not funny, and they not only spread waves of pain out from your high-handed actions. Your easy cruelty is not only unkind or unfair, you see, but it is murderous. For just as Hitler once openly acted and believed that a better society would exist if the weak and unproductive and the lesser, by the determination alone, of the prejudices of him and his kind alone, and this resulted in the slaughter, suffering, murder, and elimination of millions — millions who never got to find out what life could have been for them, well this same attitude murders people now, too. For there will always be those whose fate it is to stumble, to draw the black Ace. And lacking resources as they are made to live just on the edge of survival, some small thing to you might mean the end for one of them; it being just enough to break him so badly, like a whipped horse, you see, that such a person’s mangled body will never rise again. So, not funny, Wilber, my head is down, and I won’t be part of the big lie anymore.”

Or so it seemed, as the Dow’s mighty charts swung lower, then lower, then lower still. Expressing the weariness of the overworked masses and their despair as they were seeing their dreams of eking out a tad of happy existence, year by year, burdened with debt, seem to be further off, rather than closer. And the despairing millions give up their “ghosts” at that, regardless of how much longer their body manages to suffer through its daily movements, with little or nothing left to hope for. No, Wilber, your kind has infected the world with the lies that give you your brief period of privilege and superiority on this Earth. But not only have you stolen from the poor, but you’ve killed off God’s creatures, mindlessly, in your vapid mind games, and now, even the planet itself.

So your kind will even kill off its own in the end. Your evil is in the end, at its base, the thick meaty dumbness that, and this is a bit funny, you see instead in those you despise. The jig has been up for many of the masses especially since the beginning of the 1980s. Many have suffered, fallen, and died, while you played. But now even you will know suffering. And it will be interesting to see just how much of your own entrails you will devour before it even occurs to the meaty thickness of your brain that it is you that you hurt.

Scout Niblett, Will Oldham, and Barack Obama: Once Again, Authenticity is Everything in Politics, Music Too. If a New Cultural Awakening Is Coming, It’s None Too Soon For Me!

I SAW A NEW DAWN RISING, PULLED BACK INTO NIGHT.

I AGAIN SEE A BRIGHTER DAY COMING. OBAMA’S WIN; THE MUSIC OF WILL OLDHAM AND SCOUT NIBLETT, AMONG OTHERS, TELL ME THAT MAGIC IS BACK, THE “BLUE MEANIES” HAVE FLED, AND THAT SOMETHING WONDERFUL MAY BE HAPPENING AGAIN

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I feel I have not liked music very much for a long time. Having been one who experienced the Beatles era — beginning to the end — and participated in the “magic” that only existed at that time, when early on, the music that said that we had all the power to make the world what it should be, made everyone I knew feel like they were important and had a role in an incredible time. That changed. And I haven’t heard anything that came even close to having any kind of message like that, let alone impact, in the decades then.

Then last year, I came across the music of Scout Niblett, Will Oldham, Daniel Johnston, Songs: Ohia, and other’s producing what is called “Indie” (from Independent”) genre. Their music did so much for my life and giving me hope about our collective future. I am convinced that Will Oldham is as much a musical genius as Bob Dylan. And I think Scout Niblett is at least as provocative, and authentic; actually more so, in particular in the way she weaves those unique percussive elements into the mix, waking you, almost shaking into you, her message.

My take of Scout’s main important sharing, her offering, her reminder to us (especially in a world of obsessive-compulsive everybodys and “Monk”) is of the perfection and beauty that is found only in the authentically unpolished, unassuming, and unpretentious. Her work says to me that we are all beautiful in the same way as Nature’s own unpolished beauty. She conveys that we are all truly geniuses, or perfect in our uniqueness, or essentially divine, or all of that. But only when we have the courage to give up trying to shape the outcomes of our actions, and to force our wills upon the world instead of flowing with it. She reminds me that we are so much more, and we border every moment the magical, when we dare let ourselves be our slightly worn and unraveled, imperfect but unique, essential selves, relying on the goodness of our divine intuition to direct our actions, foregoing and putting behind us the mental filters that act like so many nagging nannies or parental voices.

I am brought again to remember that being oneself is not only beautiful, but is what brings down the barriers between us all, and thereby helps us to realize our Unity. We see so much fake “beauty” – inhuman, unnatural productions of technicians – a “beauty” that relies on the precisely timed, measured, and symmetrical patterning of auditory elements, copied, as precisely as atoms, or files on a computer, from past creations, Now no longer “alive.” Such “music” I’ve heard, it is astonishing in its familiarity, its sameness, its ability to NOT wake us up. It makes for good office, workshop, or supermarket music, for it soothes us like a familiar heartbeat to a baby. To its “credit,” its guaranteed not to disrupt your driving either; and perhaps that’s why there’s so much of it: Folks living ever more busy and complex lives, how many choose music that might actually shake them up and cause them to lose their footing, in this rat race to a nowhere, disguising itself as survival and endlessly shape-shifting to mimic the meanderings of the victim’s thinking, so as not to ever be seen (“Nowhere Man” – The Beatles). So, to busy to even want real music. Yes, that’s one big diiference between my generation and what happened afterwards when others were forced to bear higher costs, lower wages, and all the rest, beginning with Reagan’s “dawn” in America, the nightmare end of which we are witnessing now. So, this so-called music, may have its roots and its attractions; still, it is a technicians production, not an artist’s, and can be produced just as well, and just as inhumanly, by computer programs.

Sadly, I’ve watched several generations of “musicians,” more fearful than they would ever show and lacking true vision or (divine) inspiration, spew out, decade after decade, such melodic or even cacophonic, offerings. Like anything else, there are those who want to be artists (musicians, writers, singers, rock stars), and then there are those who have no choice and must do their art, exercise their unique talent, even if no reward is to be had (remember Mozart died penniless, cast into a pauper’s grave). Like Mozart, true genius has no choice.

Scout and Will create perfection in their very insistence on following the razor’s edge of the imperfect, the “not cool,” even the “inappropriate.” Scout, like Oldham, reawakens us to the sublime perfection of the spontaneous and raw tonal pathways, occurring only in the moment, those perfectly askance and glancing, slightly unraveled apparently random, somehow precisely tweaked, purely in the moment intuitive impulses and flashes and even unconscious elements; thus, I hear the channeling of a divine splendor that Scout, for one, could not shake if she tried.

Scout and Will create astonishing audio resting places for the mind, which border on the otherworldly. Quite different from each other are their productions, but equally adept are they in creating the trippy new worlds the lyrics and music weave out of the finer filaments of your mind. The genius of Scout Niblett and Will Oldham lies in their incredible bravery in being truly authentic (not fake authentic; you really see their many facets, which aren’t always flattering). And that authenticity comes only out of an incredible willingness to throw oneself directly into the fires of their fears. I could go on, but just to say that that truth comes through like something so true that it partakes of whatever it is that holds us all up and keeps it all together. And that Truth, in which they express themselves, in my opinion is what makes their music more than good, easy on the ears, etc.; it is what takes it beyond music to something magical…

Indeed, like the Beatles did to an entire generation long ago, I came away changed by their music the first time I heard it. I couldn’t stop listening all night long, and by the morning I felt I would never be the same again. And I haven’t been. Like Barack Obama, Scout Niblett and Wild Oldham also give me the feeling that life is really worth living. That you really do want to hang around in this skin-encapsulated ego for a while. Even if just for the incredibly magical you encounter occasionally.

To Know God, Go to Children, Not Church

It’s hard for me to find a greater joy than allowing myself to be a child again among children. Not judging, not being “the authority,” being just a friend, children are absolutely delighted when you approach them that way; for it is all they ever wanted of you, to see them as they are — imperfect and learning — and not as compared to what they will need to be when they grow up. A lot less teaching; a lot more fun. If you can remember that children are only little friends who simply have less experience in some matters than you, you will view them no differently than a friend who has less experience in some field in which you have lots. And when you can see and approach them that way, you may just hear and see and learn again so many things you wish you’d never forgotten; and you’ll remember that when you were a child you had a much more palpable sense of the divinity all around, and within…just like these children have. Being with children is the closest thing I’ve found to feeling divinity present.

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