Jesus Ignored, God Misunderstood, An All-Loving God Maligned; But The Great Reveal Has Begun:

A God of All-Encompassing and Infinite Love,

beyond any Human’s Ability to even Imagine

Exists

He Is Closer Now than Any Other Time,

Something Wonderful is Going to Happen.

To put it all in context, we review how it all began . . .

Not even a month has passed,

yet it seems like the time before is ancient history…now.

We think back to the broadcasts:

“Breaking News…..Obvious Truths Discovered – Despite 25,000 Year Cover-Up, Slander, and Pervasive, Omnipresent, Persistent Misinformation, Big Lies, and Propaganda Campaign

* A Virtual Matrix of Religiousity Pompously Substituting Itself for Reality and Truth

* The Big Reveal — God Is Good and All-Merciful Ends Up Being Not Happy Talk to Comfort Us Before Inevitable Death and then Eternal Life in Fiery Hell of Suffering

* The Big Reveal — Turns Out God Is Actually Good, Real Good, All-Good, and Certainly Gooder Than Any Human Can Imagine

* Investigation Into Coverup Reveals That Source of Idea of Hell Is Actually Tight-Assed Controlling Compulsives Who – Well – Not so Good

* 25,000 Year Campaign to Control Others By Scaring Crap Out of Them With a Totally Concocted and Most Horrible, Frightening Idea Ever to Exist is Actually a Product of Very Sick Humans

* Reporters Rushed to Record Reaction on Street Hear

• “How Could I Have Been Such a Dufus!” –

• “Well, Of Course That’s True, How Could We Not See It!” –

• “How Could They Do That to Us!” –

• “Wow, Humans Are Real Dumb-Fucks” –

• “Unbelievable! It Was Right in Front of Us the Entire Time!” ***

• “I Knew It; But Nobody Would Believe Me. How Can God Be Both Good and Also More Capable of Evil Than Even The Most Twisted Human? In Fact, More Evil Than All of the Evil of All Humans Who Ever Lived Combined. What I Found So Amazing Is That People Believed That Extremely Sick, Twisted View, Never Catching a Wit of Its Absurdity in All That Incredibly Long Time. Shows How Truly Terrified People Really Are on The Inside”

– It’s Reported That Last Quote Was From Someone Who Hates Twitter ***

*** More Coming ***

*** “Latest Developments on Discovery of the Obvious About God and the Overnight Revision of and Now Near Universally Accepted Scientific Starting Premise on Human Species as “bunch of real dumb shits” and “seriously brain-twisted from birth”….

Latest Reveals Include God Not Just Good – er Really, Really, Really to the infinite power Good –

also that God is incredibly, amazingly, and fantastically (tothe inf. pow) FUNNY.

Actually hilarious… a “real riot”…quite the crackup….

Reports coming out saying He/She is infinitely fun to hang out with, nothing comparing to it, “you laugh your ass off!”…

and unself-consciously silly beyond belief, beyond imagining…

so much so that, reports are, “You won’t die laughing, because, well, turns out you can’t (die, that is), but you’ll probably laugh so hard tears will be streaming down your cheeks,

if so inclined, you may end up literally roflmao or roflol … well not literally for the “ass off” but certainly for the “rolling on the floor”…

and “good chance you’ll pee your pants” (He/She is really, inf. pow. Good and is not offended… like so much so we question why we mentioned that)

*** More Coming ***

“Message in a Bottle: A Message Arrives from Nine Years in the Past Predicting Today’s Events” by SillyMickel Adzema

We are disturbed reading that nine years ago our present National Situation was foreseen. Worse, we are reminded of what we lost; what could have been; how we’ve managed to block that from our memory in accepting the much diminished prospects now; but also how we should not forget; how we should remember how it happened; who was to blame; who helped and colluded in bringing it about, and why; so that, remembering, we might never let it happen again. For we learn, worst of all, that our chance to progress, rather, just to survive, now depends on remembering. Because nine years ago all that’s happened since could easily have been prevented if only we had not allowed ourselves to be talked into forgetting the history of only eight years prior to that. This is a serious and thoughtful piece, which everyone would do well to know, if we are to survive another 50 years, not to mention a century or longer. Still, the author is not of the sort that facing the harsh realities means we need go around glumly, martyr-like, in sack-cloth and ashes. Rather, the author feels we might as well enjoy and make use of all the God-given abilities we have whatever the outcome of our efforts. So don’t be surprised that this exposition is aided by guest appearances making their points in hilarious fashion. If you’ve never heard George Bush as Blutto from Animal House, you’ve got to. Wolf Blitzer is not recognized for being a comic, but when he goes on to explain to his faithful viewers how they’ve been lied to and manipulated for years, because of pressure from the Administration, and how grateful he is for their gullibility as he is receiving promotions and honors because his viewership is polling the highest in mindlessly accepting the concocted view, well we see many new sides of Wolf. Thought-provoking but funny, another thing he explains is that their incredible success over the years in getting people to believe and or to forget whatever they want, has resulted in their having a little celebration consisting of an experiment as well (which they hope will bring them in even tighter with the now all-powerful Administration). The celebration-experiment consists of a documentary in which the entire truth of the multiyear campaign to lie, deceive, and to control minds is laid out. And the experiment part is that they are certain that the next day and ever afterwards when such thing ever being aired is denied, the people will completely forget it and believe they must have been mistaken. Wolf signs off: “One last reminder on our special tonight, the documentary, “Freedom of the Press, Repealed. The Story and How, this Repeal Now Thoroughly Institutionalized Over six Years, We Can Now Reveal How We’ve Duped You and Will Continue To.” Tune in, don’t miss it; You’re sure to forget it.”

 

 

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.

 

I read my words of nine years ago, e.g.

 

“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.”

 
 

Prophetic?  Eerie? I don’t know quite what to make of it. Reading more, this popped to attention:

 

“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 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.”

 
 

Having foreseen it, I couldn’t have felt more helpless, knowing that America’s, indeed, the world’s, prospects for regaining a financial footing, whereas a mere nine years ago looked like liftoff, now was predicted as decades off, and that just to regain an ordinariness of life, with some saying that Americans will never again, ever, enjoy the standard of living they once took for granted.

 
 

It certainly disturbed me and got me to wondering, and then to writing.

  
 

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 catscans of a mind and time provide such a contrast, stark and shocking. 

 

I have much to say, much have I remembered, and much have I reviewed in my mind, observing the timeline of these events, and the changes in the social and cultural and in people themselves as these events happened, one following another, changing us all. I will make myself clearer following the piece itself.

 

But before either, I wish for you to consider how I felt, what went through me, and to take on a little journey, a little reverie, that may provide a glimpse ahead, perhaps an understanding of the unbelievable, as a journey through the looking glass can often do:

 

A writer’s words of nine years ago come back to haunt, sadden, provoke, enlighten, and motivate. How would you feel if you found out for sure that you foresaw, in an eerily accurate way, the events that would transpire over the last nine years before they happened? Sometimes we all have a sense of what the future is likely to bring forth. Everyone, in fact, has some working model of the future. But, be honest, and you’ll probably acknowledge that those models of the future are almost always some kind of continuation of the present and the recent past, perhaps with a few technological advances thrown in. And usually, being the hopeful optimists we must be in order to continue our daily efforts, we envision something that is at least somewhat of a progression, something a little better, at least.

 

But what if you foresaw an exact reversal of the current trends, including an economic debacle, recession, market crash, nine years before it happened and even that it would happen about that time? You could think yourself prophetic. It could pump up your ego. However, if you also knew that you did not pick those predictions out of the air but that you had lived through a similar period in the past, and if you also had had decades of experience intensively witnessing the revelations of the deepest patterns of individuals’ minds (as a facilitator in a deep-feelings therapy), all kinds of minds, so that you knew something about what really moved people; and you added to that your own multi-decade exploration of your own mind and motivations and feelings lying deeper and deeper all the way to the roots of your beings, so that you had a pretty comprehensive view of what caused you to be who you were; and along with this understanding of others and yourself you had also been an avid observer, and participant, of the social and cultural events and movements over the decades, going back to the fifties. Well, then you might attribute it to being an astute but quite expected conclusion arising from the visible evidence of the times.

 

But then you are no important person, pundit, or professional prognosticator. You have written and achieved moderate success as a voice in your field, and you had begun receiving invitations to write or be interviewed for other publications. But your social, political, and cultural commentary had been met with silence, even among those who followed your writings on the mind, its origins and its changes over millennia, and the current context and how it might be affected, and even attributed superlatives to your insights that you knew better than to just notice and put behind you. No, just silence, the masses have not come “scrambling to your door,” nor have you been offered any jobs, or even invited to write on such topics elsewhere. You expect that you are not unusual in your perceptions, and any contrary thought is met with the fact that there has been dead silent response to your ideas; you feel that many people have similar predictions inside themselves.

 

But then, these events unfold over the years, as you predicted. And, without exception, the experts, the paid prognosticators, the pundits — all of them — to a person — bemoan wearily the complete inability of anyone to have foreseen any of what transpired. And, to a person, they talk as if these things came completely out of nowhere, a freakish weather pattern or an act of God — falling to Earth like the chunks of chemicalized frozen icebombs of jetliner rest room waste; or the lightning bolts out of some dark Mysterium Tremendum hovering high in the sky above us — but in no way having roots in any previous events.

 

These people, these commentators on events who you see nightly, and whose every word is broadcast into the minds of multimultimillions and then often repeated again, or more than once, but then also echoed far and wide in venues and by people of all kinds and in all countries afterwards, these people with such immeasurable power to reach and influence the minds of a global populace, well, they also went through the same events as you, as proven by their age. Yet they also do not ever mention the times before that were so similar as to cause you — nine years earlier to make what seemed the obvious conclusions you made. And now, even in retrospect, those obvious near exact patterns of events of the not so long ago, are not mentioned by them! Instead an attitude of “we’re just human, and nobody could have known” predominates.

 

Well, this would cause you to ponder, would it not? How could so many people — people whose job it is to do so — not connect the obvious dots that you and others did nine years ago and now even in retrospect they are unable to?

 

Some of the possibilities could be that the people who are speaking for everyone have not risen to their levels on their abilities but that something else is behind their being seated in such powerful positions to speak and shape the thoughts of the multimillions. You might also ponder, then, if better, more astute prognosticators and analysts were being kept out of the positions of influence intentionally.

 

What it would come down to is asking yourself: Are you somehow the only one who is capable of making obvious predictions from the recent past (which might make you feel really good if you had some problem in your life where you had been made to doubt your abilities; but which if you continued to think that way, would have you living in a world of your own that did not have any ties to reality)? Or, if humble and astute enough and not so desperately needy of a pleasant thought about oneself, you would need to ask yourself and consider more seriously the prospect that the media reaction could very well be an unexpected part of the original prediction.

 

Given thought now, consider: If one had predicted an erosion of basic rights, and that had come to pass, why would not freedom of speech and of the press have been part of that erosion? Thinking more deeply, would it not have been a necessary part of the erosion of all the rest? For if the press had been doing its job would it not have been acting as protectors of our rights in decrying any assaults, proclaiming all intrusions, documenting all erosions, and so on, in the uncountable ways that it has done in the past?

 

Would that not have been a second “2” which combined with the other
“2” then makes total sense out of the “4” you’re observing and trying to understand?

 

But as usually happens, when stumbling on the hidden but obvious, other, sometimes laughably obvious correlates come to mind: If Freedom of Speech and of the Press had been part of the erosion in human rights — the rights laid out by our Bill of Rights — well, who would be researching, detailing, proclaiming, or making documentaries about it? The Press? HA!

 

Well, of course, you think, sarcastically. Surely they would have done lots of things, for example, one of them would no doubt have gone like this:

 

“This is Wolf Blitzer. Tonight, tune in as CLN details the way we, and the rest of the mass media, have been slowly but relentlessly pressured and bullied into presenting the views of the party in power, the Republicans; how we have learned it to be in our interests, if we were to continue unobstructed, to eliminate more and more of the voices contrary to those in power. You will hear how we learned techniques of deception of our own so that we could seem to be presenting a range of views but how we could easily get the viewer to conclude that the party pressuring us was the most credible. How?

 

Tune in and learn how we matched the words of sophisticated and savvy talking heads from the administration against the least informed and least polished of those on the opposition, and how we managed a game, which we termed, keep-out-the-insightful, of politely putting off, through excuses of saying we were focusing on areas not in their realm at the present, and a multitude of such ploys, as years went by and they began to doubt their currency and thus doubted themselves and no longer sought to air their views in any but much smaller venues.

 

Tune in to see how mass media like ourselves were able, because of our collectively acting in the same way, having been pressured toward the exact same ends by the one power in America currently, the Republicans and the “filthy rich” owners of our corporations — being essentially one and the same with one being the public and the other the private faces of the same group — were able to cast doubt into the minds of seasoned intelligent and astute analysts as to their worth and currency and that of their ideas in the current era, making them feel that their time had come and gone and that personally they were has-beens, as at the same time we recruited the least able and the most naïve to take their places.

 

Other ploys: See how we kept media favorites who opposed the administration and who were astute observers and witty, articulate communicators for their side, on the dole and were even able to reap the profits of their appearances but how we slyly undermined their positions in myriad sly ways, using known effects of time of day scheduling, competition in particular time slots, sequencing of segments within shows, and of the shows themselves in the lineup, all in ways to discredit and garner the least audience for these voices.

 

So, see how we maintained our position and survived an assault on the Press, by caving in to the dictatorial demands of a Party that also essentially owned us, surreptitiously of course, but how we managed to the fool the public that we had in any way done so; how we managed at times to fool the public that we were their adversaries for truth and a counterbalance, as the Fourth Estate traditionally had been, to the powers of government and wealth, while in fact we were totally their tools in concocting the realities we were told to and muddying or ignoring the truths that came our way that would have been illuminating to the public presented fairly, but would have undermined the position we were pressured to present.

 

So, tonight, our special documentary, “Freedom of the Press, Repealed. The Story, and How — This Repeal Now Thoroughly Institutionalized Over Six Years — We Can Reveal How We’ve Duped You and Will Continue To.”

 

Be sure to tune in or TiVo it. For it is just a little fun we are allowing ourselves — that of spilling the beans about what is really behind the things we bring to you as actual events and true analysis — as a kind of celebration of the thoroughness of our success, and as a proof to the administration at how thoroughly we have manipulated your thinking that we can dare to lay it all out and feel certain that it will fail to enlighten a single one of you, in fact we feel it will aid us in an aspect of our campaign — that of keeping you confused so that you will be dependent on us for your conclusions. Especially when tomorrow evening and from now on, there will be no mention that this documentary ever existed, it will be expunged from all lists and archives and thoroughly be extracted and destroyed, as if it never existed. And we will begin a comprehensive campaign to add to our success in confusing and then convincing the public of the administration’s version of events, and to add to our favor with the now sole power in America, by a calculated effort that we have designed that we think will be very successful and that you will enjoy, of the slow elimination, first, of American’s collective memory of its past, beginning with the most recent and then, hopefully if successful and of course with your help, will continue further into the past; and following right behind the elimination of memory — no, we’re not going to tell you exactly how, now that wouldn’t be very game-spirited of us would it; although, no one but you and I here now, I’ll give you a hint — confusion, for one, has been found to be extremely powerful in clouding out the details of memory — now, that’s all I’m gonna say, and believe me, if I wasn’t so totally convinced that we have been so successful that we can tell you just about anything and get away with it, then I wouldn’t have even said that. But of course, I am. That’s why people like me still have these jobs, while — gad, for a second there I almost said, my god just like it were the old days, I almost said, while “you may have noticed the losses and demotions of many formerly household names here at CLN who haven’t been as cooperative, supportive, committed, or as convinced, as I certainly am, of our ability to totally manipulate your thinking, as we wish.

 

And, ha, ha, I have to say I have my viewership to thank for that. Sincerely, I owe a great debt of gratitude to you folks who regularly tune in to my show in particular. Why, the absolute malarkey that I was putting out to you, slowly at first, not feeling totally convinced of your gullibility, I mean, still in those days it was pretty irrational and unbelievable bull droppings, completely concocted out of only the hot air emanating from egotistical rants of those whose sole desire is only to comfort and enslave you.

 

Yet, the pollings that came in showed that I could practically fart out these concoctions and you would swallow them whole like tasty confections! I truly began to feel that I was like Moses bringing nightly the stone tablets; such was the utter inability among the masses of you to evaluate in any way what you were being fed.

 

My colleagues say that my success is my beard and frizzy hair — part patriarchal, paternal, Moses-like, as well as appealing to My Generation base of long hairs and facial hair valuing; to which we added my supposed background as a member of a Sixties band and interest in current rock music — we felt we needed to do more to convince them, with their tradition of question authority and all — and, well, we must’ve got some of them at least because the polls were overwhelming in their insistence on my staunch credibility.

 

So, I just want to say again that my success is owed completely to you, my viewers, and your unbelievably vapid minds, inane gullibility, or busied, stressed, overworked, or threatened existences as to make you grasp at anything outside as being of more substance than what you feel inside, and perhaps more pleasant.

 

But whatever it is, thank you, and keep it up. In this next experiment, I’m sure you’ll show up, among all the segments of our viewership, as being the least able to remember and the easiest to forget what we will tell you later tonight. I’m sure you can do it.

 

Oh, but now I’m forgetting. Sorry, I just got caught up in a wave of heartfelt gratitude to you all. The high ratings you give me and the solid staunch belief in my credibility that comes so high in the pollings, well they just … just that I get choked up … sorry, folks … this part is between me and you and … well, you’ll forget it anyway, if it’s decided by the Deciders later, that you can’t have it … so between us, well, how do you thank someone who has taken you from the ratings floor to the moon? How do you thank someone who has given up their reason for your success? You see, I take it as a kind of personal affection you must have towards me, who you don’t even know, to be so willing to be the greatest mass of idiot viewers on TV, getting the prize certainly. Because, you know, I simply can’t imagine that people exist who could be so unbelievably lacking in reason, intelligence, or simply the ability to remember what we say from one night to the next, as to swallow so hungrily the pig slop that I’ve been out here portraying as accurate, unbiased, etc. HA. Ha. Oh, the drivel we won’t say. So, unless somehow they’ve managed to create people with air balloons for brains… ha, ha…… No, No, no. Sorry, my friends, my bad on that. Let me assure you that has not happened. No, there are no people who’s heads are actually balloons. Believe me, OK? Ok, then, what I’m saying is that unless the greatest percentage of you is vapid minded or brain dead — and that I don’t believe folks — then the only thing could be that you folks really care about me and making me a success as to sacrifice your own thought, reason, and individuality. Well, yea, I’m sure you’re getting something out of it too, Y’know. I’m sure it helps having not to think and being able to just tune in nightly to be told what’s true and what to believe and never to be given anything unsettling or contrary as to cause you to be upset and have those horrible feelings of uncertainty.

 

So, anyway, we get it, we get each other, and together let’s go make newscasting history — if they’ll ever keep an accurate one… hmmm… oh well. But at least for now, going back to what I was telling you about our next big wave of … well, some on our side might call it mind control or even enslavement … but you and I know that you’re better off with us giving you your reality, your memories, your beliefs. I’m sure you’ve all realized by now that we’re doing a whole lot better than the crappy reality you all had before we started helping you out.

 

So the exciting next phase, as I was saying begins with the slow elimination of recent memory, then memory further back. And to put it in a nutshell: We’re going to give you new happier memories, and interpretations of those memories that you’ll just relish. Just like we’ve recreated your present by substituting confusing reality with simple heart-warming, however untrue, views and perceptions. Well, together we’ve been so successful that we’re going to show our gratitude by doing the same for your past. Of course, in pleasing our Deciders, it will be the grand events of the past, the ones that are in their interest to change, that will be conveniently removed and replaced by versions to suit them, but you can trust us, you’ll much prefer, in fact we guarantee, you’ll enjoy. And, be patient, once we’ve been able to do that; you’re going to have to help of course… of course you will; with that accomplished, we’ll be able to help more and more with your personal memories. Not too long now, and you’ll have wonderful happy memories — we’ll have taken your miserable real ones — splendid memories that will completely buttress the views that we’ve been feeding you, giving you personal, unreal, memories of personal experiences that prove the validity of the beliefs that we’ve caused you to have. And believe you me, we’re going to load it up with goodies of all kinds — ice cream dates, Christmases perfect and loving, Fourth of July celebrations and innocent love under the fireworks — but that’s enough. Just you be assured, your gonna have your very own “Happy Days” for a personal past. Our guarantee at CLN – the Central Lying News.

 

Now, back to regular programming, save one last reminder on our special tonight, the documentary, “Freedom of the Press, Repealed. The Story, and How — This Repeal Now Thoroughly Institutionalized Over Six Years — We Can Reveal How We’ve Duped You and Will Continue To.” Tune in, don’t miss it; You’re sure to forget it.”

 

***

 

Back to reality, I think, now let’s take a look at that catscan from the past.

 

These writings I will reproduce here for your consideration. However 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.  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.

 

“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 gunmen.  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 dishonest 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 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.BPM II hopelessness, hate, and derision.

 

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, Apocalypse, Or New Age? (http://www.primalspirit.com/emerging_perinatal_book.htm), 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

 

***

 

I reread my words of nine years ago, e.g.: 

 

“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.”

 

Hmm… Supreme Court? Check.

 

Environment? Check.

 

Our good economy? Well, that topic demands more than a mere “Check,” in the obvious day and night quality of the change and the way it was done, the way it should have been foreseen, the way there was collusion at all levels for it to happen, and the obvious conclusions to be drawn as to who made it happen, and why, based on all the foreknowledge, was it intentional to devastate the richest country in the world and to bring its workers to their knees, as well as the American Government before all the other nations of the world, having to humiliate themselves as bedraggled homeless beggars, pleading for a handout, also on its knees. What kind of Americans would engage in such an act of undermining this country, an outright act of betrayal?

 

Just a side thought that might later have value for some: In writing that last, I was reminded of Judas selling out Jesus for 30 pieces of gold; and I was struck by the longevity and potency of a template, so simple — in this age of Ocean’s 11 and the high tech wizardry that could have been employed; and indeed was employed, e.g., for the 911 caper; yet this simple motive still moving people? — Apparently so aligned with a human nature hardly unchanged.

 

Back to the economy, remember folks, at that time, still under Clinton and before Bush took office, we had a budget surplus that we were eagerly debating how we could use to benefit our country and world, including happy notions like universal solar for all homes, universal health care, and so many other things. So many ideas were bandied about — all real possibilities considering the size of the surplus, which had been created by — this should be kept in mind for it is hugely important later, and now — the surplus was created by a moderate tax increase on the extremely rich and the creation of millions of new jobs, all tax paying jobs, combined with strict oversight of the costs of government programs and the reeling in of any that had the marks of beginning to get out of hand.

 

All those happy ideas of how to use the surplus — yet no one envisioned the possibility that actually occurred, requiring as it would that people of unnatural stupidity or intent to harm would manage to not only win an election, but also take over government so thoroughly and eliminate intelligent input so thoroughly and seamlessly, and obliterate any and all objection at any level, including that of the media and therefore the population, well who WOULD have considered such an elaborate and abhorrent possibility — for one thing its abject failure recently apparent; its certainty to benefit few if any, its guarantee of destroying huge benefits possible that would benefit virtually everyone; and alongside that no media or public outcry? Impossible. Who would have considered that? Who would have considered the surplus eventually being thrown into the “bring-back-the-flat-earth” bin essentially reviving the disproven economics of only eight years ago, that had led to a great recession, a Clinton victory, and the reversal of that policy with these spectacular results. Would this person have had to be asleep for 20 years, eight minimum, hopelessly self- and other-destructive? What?

 

Back to that time, however, still setting up the context that preceded the one of the last eight years. Clinton’s plan was simple and it worked. So, simple policy that ordinary folks employ in balancing their household budgets, not rocket science, applied sincerely by Clinton, had achieved what had been considered the impossible and as elusive as the Holy Grail: the quest of the Balanced Budget,

 
 

Many a Republican President had claimed as a top priority and made a central plank in his election platform, but a term or two later, after absolute failure and in fact causing a tripling or quadrupling of the national debt instead, had claimed was as elusive and difficult to achieve as the Holy Grail, and also blamed the Democrats, largely for programs instituted in the past, like Social Security and Medicare, and so on, which they knew coming into office, and which they slashed. But still they could not achieve a balanced budget.

 

Then in comes Clinton, one of the supposedly free-spenders party, roundly criticized for budget-busting and national debt increasing policies (somehow the Republicans and media still were able to conflate the two even after 12 disastrous years of Reagan-Bush that had proved — and dear people, if only it had been remembered, should have been proved for all time and become a huge national debate if not uproar when George W. Bush’s first major act was to reverse the successful economic policies of Clinton and reinstitute those of Reagan-Bush, with everyone in complete remembrance of what a debacle that had been once.

 

But this is not brought out in the media.

 

In a country with a truly free press, not owned by the very people who would benefit by such a reversal, this renewal of the disastrous policies of only a decade earlier would have been all over the place and the analogies would ripe for picking, like: “Bush elects rebuilding the Titanic exactly the same way as before. Claims we as Americans are not dumb enough to run into icebergs as Europeans are.”

 

Or, how about: “Bush proposes eliminating Food and Drug Administration, saying it will save taxpayers dollars. Claims no longer needed because the kindly corporations of the current era no longer need the regulations of the past, which were directed against people of a time that contained more unsavory, non-Patriotic, non-American types”

 

Even as I say these ridiculous things, I can’t help realizing how variations of them were actually used, in pushing through the changes that resulted in the economic debacle currently. As one example: even Greenspan is reported at one time, I believe it was toward the end of the Clinton era, to have said that we have reached a point of corporate and monetary discipline wherein corporations can be expected to be self-disciplining and not requiring the regulations of the past, which, now acting as restrictions, if loosened, and trusting in their self-discipline, would free them to create greater prosperity, eventually benefitting all.” Paraphrasing, but certainly Greenspan has been named one of the “Dirty Dozen” by CNN, in creating the economic debacle. And to his credit, this sorry character, has admitted his part and the wrongness of vision, advice, and recommendation.

 

But that example, with the very words Greenspan used and video of him saying it kept in the archives; and his clear retraction afterwards, again in his own words and captured unmistakably on video is a slam-dunk proven example that this inanity existed.

 

But the question that comes up, Is that not just an isolated example?

 

Wish that it were so. For this I have not at hand, though I ‘m sure there are loads of written testimony and concrete evidence on the books that correspond nicely to create the proof that Bush’s idiocy rose to the level of that portrayed earlier — disbanding the protections of the American people, using inane ideas meant to pander and garner acceptability for disastrous policy reversals.

 

Oh, one more spoken one in evidence before I get to the less obvious but more comprehensive reversals that has Bush fully opting to remove all the protections deemed by legislators over hundreds of years to be necessary to protect average Americans from the tendency of the corporations in their greed and the pressure of competition to overreach with disastrous consequences for ordinary Americans, including their loss of life, health, and finances.

 

The one I’m speaking of has to do with the Maddof scandal. Called the largest “Ponzie” scheme in history, bilking so many of those who are in the know in Wall Street, or perhaps should have been, in that they had enough wealth to be, the pundits were nonstop in their analyzing various aspects of it that should have given rise to suspicion and led to investigation long before it actually occurred. There seemed again to be no end to the “I don’t know how this happened. It shouldn’t have. It seems impossible.” Again that refrain. Lacking insight, history, perspective, and having gotten your job partially because of having a lack of understanding of the areas you cover, as opposed to a BETTER understanding, well, these things don’t seem to have any causes any more than that chemicalized frozen chunk of jet restroom waste randomly landing here, as opposed to there.

 

Well that kind of “Somebody should have known, and we don’t understand why they didn’t” got blown out of the water when a former SEC official, an investigator or at least a would-be one came before Congress.

 

Well, before reiterating what transpired, let’s not forget those weeks of “How could this have happened?” repeated endlessly.

 

The result of the testimony in Congress was that the SEC under Bush was told to lie low on investigating “anything” and, well, isn’t this the way a C-student would think, essentially they were given the directive to look like they were busy but not to really accomplish anything or to their jobs.

 
 

What’re you in Animal House, Bush? What’re you, Blutto, telling the housemates,

 

“Hey, buds, there ain’t no need to do any studying or any of that crap. Look, we got a good gig. I got elected President

 

(ok, maybe that part wouldn’t be Blutto, however)

 

and that means (now sounding like Cartman) “I can do what I WANT!”

 

So, nobody can tell us what to do, and we’re gonna paaaarrrtttttiiiiiii. Whooooo.

 

So, no homework. Don’t worry, I’ve got it all worked out that we’ll get the answers before every exam so that we can look like we’re doing something.

 

Don’t worry, you’ll get your checks. And in the meantime, might I say, (now hollerin’) “THERE’S A KEGGER JUST BEEN TAPPED IN THE KITCHEN,” …. AND… (bringing the volume down low now, conspiratorially, like…) “and, for those so inclined… if you catch my drift… And now don’t kill each other in the rush, be cool… well, let’s just say that the microwave and toaster I hear, have been enlisted to aid in cooking up something, not so much for the palate, but (snorting loudly)… (And at that many of the frats had already started dashing towards the kitchen)

 

(And Blutto-Bush, raising his voice over the clamor now, and hollering above all 🙂 “LET’S JUST SAY THAT – IF THE RIGHT IS RIGHT, THAN RIGHT IS WHITE. AND AIN’T NO BETTER BREAKFAST THAN THAT KIND ‘S SERVED ON A MIRROR. Yee Haaaaa.”

 
 

So, before attributing the obvious blame, let us not overlook this example, this one kind of example of something rampant throughout the media and throughout government at all levels during the eight years of Republican dominance:

 

For eight years Bush had let it be known that the SEC should not have to, in fact should back off, from investigating. Basically the SEC was told to not do its job; it was basically to pretend, to collect checks, to engage in busy work. And it wasn’t the only agency that was disabled by Bush, but my point has more to do with journalism. For the question is, How could Bush have gotten away with all this? How could his dismantling of the functions of government put in place long ago by people, well, no stretch needed here, OBVIOUSLY smarter than him, gone UNREPORTED?

 

In any other time, does it not seem likely that this sort of disabling of the SEC would have been uncovered by the Fourth Estate, over the course of so many years? Were there no longer any investigative journalists in Washington? Were there just photogenic media personalities, with little knowledge of their area of reporting?

 

Well, from the sound of those journalists without a clue about the Maddoff scandal — doing lots of on-air wondering and “gee, I dunno” “hard to understand” and such, instead of off-the-air investigation, which would have resulted in that time being used to enlighten the public about the unheard of government hand in undoing the government’s work; instead of giving everyone the feeling that these things don’t have individual actors behind them, no one accountable for them, and life is just a random series of accidents.

 

 
 

Breaking News: This just in… to my brain… Question: Is it possible that the “What-me-worry?” president’s philosophy — ok, let’s say encapsulated by “Gee, I dunnoh. Nobody EVER imagined such a thing like that could happen. And besides, it’s “hard work.” So, as for responsibility, well “What, me worry?” –- Ok, understood now?

 

Y’know, the befuddled C student’s view of the world: learned enough to know the kinds of things that happen, but not having studied enough or been curious enough to learn why they happen and crucially, how they are prevented, if not wanted, or made to happen, if desirable. (That would’ve gotten a B or A).

 

But the question remains: Did he bring in a wave of C students with him? Well, lots of evidence to that happening in his government, but, in the media? Well is it possible that he set the example of “Gee, I dunnoh” becoming acceptable.

 
 

Not so outrageous when you consider that Reagan did something very much akin to that, setting up the average know-nothing as somehow more astute because of genetically predisposed intuition to know without having to work to check, find out, research, or discover. Making the average schmuck feel like they were better than any college educated.

 
 

Pretty convenient too when you’re policies include cutbacks in funding at all levels of education. So, Reagan’s perfect scheme: Republican’s know that educated people vote by great percentages more for Democrats than for Republicans. So, gut education. Make education more expensive. Continue to change higher education, as started in 1971, so it is swept of all the kinds of content and courses that often lead to insight and to individuals, and heavily fund highly specialized programs of ethically neutral technical information — forget the arbitrary, culture and time-bound, and ephemeral and changing nature of those technicalities — programs that would be designed by the corporations to produce the work pool they can feed from, already paid for trained by the government, something they had had to do in the past.

 
 

As for all those who don’t get into higher education for lack of resources and all those who wouldn’t have gone anyway, but would have felt inferior because of that: Well, in the anti-intellectualism that you put out (something that is a technique of every totalitarian government ever to have existed), they encourage the uneducated to feel they’re smarter than if they had gone; and encourage them to look down on and despise the educated and what the educated come to discover if, for example, like global warming or the environment, like in Reagan’s time, or the dangers of nuclear anything (again, Reagan’s time), well, you can appeal directly to the uneducated to simply feel better that those idiots have scared the crap out of themselves with all that “book knowledge” when you, yourself, have the intuition of the common hard-working (uneducated) man to inform you of what’s what, along with the help, of course, of a Republican party that understands you like a Daddy would, and, to hell with what they say about what the Republicans are supposedly doing to our wages and such; hell I just know that they’s good people in noticing that I’m a better person than my smarter brother, cousin, father, sister, whatever, that went off to college and got their heads all dang messed up with big words that don’t mean nothing.

 
 

So, “What me worry?”

 
 

Anyway, the Maddof scandal broke and the journalists were not knowledgeable in their field, did not have any investigative journalists in their entire corporation to uncover the obvious occurring in all Department’s under Bush over many long years, were hired for their lack of vision and kept in the dark, or something. Anyway, it showed the continuing complicity, if not outright cooperation, in covering up the Republican’s agenda and its failure as it became more and more apparent.

 

By the way, what happened at that Congressional hearing was that SEC employee detailed how he’d become aware of the Maddof scandal and had “begged” his superiors to be allowed to investigate it, turned down, and going back again and again, asking to be given permission to look into it, even offering to risk his life by going undercover to do it. Nothing. No permission granted. Nobody in the SEC wanting to know anything about the biggest ripoff of that sort in American history. The SEC assigned to be the one to oversee such activities absolutely refusing to do its job.

 

And, as I mentioned earlier, eventually it came out the way Bush disabled virtually all of government that had been put in place to protect Average Americans from large thievish entities, many of whom would affect them unknowingly and from afar (like Food, Drug, Water, etc.) with dire consequences. How he did it: He placed in the positions of highest power in these agencies people firmly entrenched with the industries or groups that are regulated by these agencies. Commonly, it is called hiring the fox to guard the henhouse.

 

Getting finally back to this checklist from 2000 after this long exposition about the economy, I said Bush’s election would lead to our

 

“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”

 

We got as far as economy. Next, “our recent relative peace in the world”? Well, check. But shouldn’t there be some kind of resounding howl, perhaps a chorus of screams, maybe of screams of the hundreds of thousands souls no longer here because of Bush’s inept policy, which we see with no doubt now as Chevron and Exxon go in, that it was for oil. But so much is known and already said on that.

 

So, next: “but things far worse than those horrors

 

In this regard, 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 publically, 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 economy 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.

 

And so said Ed. Thank you, Mr. Ed, I know you’ve been doing the rounds lately and I appreciate your making the time for us.

 

Now, back in 2000, I also had written:

 

I believe we are in grave danger of losing 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. 

 
 

I believe Ed speaks eloquently about those far greater horrors; indicating that they are dangers right now on our doorstep. We had a surplus and the will to tackle them nine years ago.

 

Sadly, we have wasted those nine years reversing the policies intended to help, and we have reversed our financial situation, which could have helped. And we have reversed the restrictions on corporations and many other policies that would have helped and at least slowed down this ominous impending doom. So we are nine years further along and have increased its acceleration at us, at the same time as we have reduced both our resources and the time in which to work.

 

The way I phrased it nine years ago:

 

“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 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.”

 
 

And sure enough, as we all know, what these people could not even imagine, as that trader put it, well its happening.  This should be something to see.

 

As for Wall Street and the Economy, well on CNBC a couple of years before the huge downturn, 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.  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 have seen, 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.

 

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, perhaps for you, the message in a bottle provided for you, 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.

 

Another advantage of having the article is what we can learn about such warnings. The feel-good media, for the sake of ratings, will not tell you of impending doom, so that we might avert it. No, they will, as we’ve seen, report afterwards on it, and bring out the “no one could have seen this happening.”

 

Well that is a self-serving lie, and I hope that is gleaned from all this if nothing else. Feel-good talk does not equal reality. If it did there would not have been the Nazis, a holocaust, a Stalin — 5 million dead, a Cambodia – millions dead, a Rwanda – dead, dead, dead; or an AIDS epidemic – uncountable dead and growing.

 

Yet what I wrote nine years ago, at the time, if it had been shared in any place of power, would not doubt have been challenged by this word: “paranoid.” This is the common way that the public uses denial to avoid harsh realities. Blame the messenger and the danger goes away.

 

I’m sure Mr. Ed’s piece earlier has already been labeled that way. “Paranoid, it’s all paranoia on the part of some “crazies.'” That is the way we keep out the truth. It’s like using a drug to ease the pain of your cancer, but doesn’t do anything to keep you from dying.

 

So Ed’s lament however it is labeled as “paranoid,” yet what he says is based on the best, most scientific understandings of our times. And it is so much more important in that we will likely reach the point of no return long before the masses of humanity are severely suffering from the continued environmental assault. I’m reluctant to say it, but it needs to be said that some are convinced that it is already too late, that we had our window of opportunity and blew it. I know of communities who are absolutely convinced that there’s no saving us now and that it is naïve to expect anything but doom.

 

Still, for all that’s been said about this message and what it has told us about what we lost and how far we are now from where we need to go; not to mention knowing that we were betrayed by our government, obviously, but now we know our media too helped, when they could have stopped it all. So these things we know. They are sobering realizations and ones we should not run from.

 

But, lastly and most importantly, these prescient thoughts of long ago help me: They 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.

C’mon Everyone Join in Now: “Why, Thank you, George Bush!”

 

 

 

…………This is my little, let us

say, oh, “thank you note” to George Bush for all his hard efforts. 

Also, in appreciation of the Paulsie Scam

which we will be dealing with forever;

luckily it’s been arranged that won’t be too long.

..

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!” by the way —

 
 

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 out the last of any money in the Treasury — wasn’t much left for Obama to do with anyway, after your eight years of partying on high with your Halliburton and your god-only-knows faceless “filthy rich,” gang. Must’ve felt like the ol’ times, eh, except for the cocaine. . . Er, I mean, I didn’t mean to presume, I mean, you can have cocaine, who am I…

 
 

Oh! What a relief, glad to hear you did not partake like the others. It’s just that, I mean George, friend, my Man here, c’mon there were some pretty weird dancing and stuff and things that had me wondering and worrying… Oh, I get it, no cocaine, but wink, wink, you’ve got your ways you say? Hmmm? Finding things better than cocaine and getting away with it? Well, he he, I’m not about to judge. I mean if we can have Rush Limbaugh asking for drug users to be hung up by their fingernails, even as he’s got a constant drip for a codeine fix, and he gets away scot free, why shouldn’t you have your fun. You alsways said it wass hardwork.

 
 

But I gotta get back to that stunt with the Treasury at the very end. I mean many, many a lesser, “criminal,” shall we say,” mind would never go back again and again, let alone in broad daylight and in front of the entire world! Gad! Was this all your idea to totally take everything while you could? Somebody else’s. Anyway, it was brilliant.

 
 

First, you enlist the support of that guy Paulson. Er, now that I know more about him, being worth $700 million, like and, getting bonuses of $37 million in 2005 and then 16.4 million the next year, why, could it actually be that he was the one that talked you into it!!! Certainly, he’d have to be characterized as one of them “filthy rich” that you helped to create, making people wonder who’s really calling the shots in Washington.

 
 

But, never mind, even if it was his good idea — and now I understand he’s had plenty of experience — being involved with the folks who did Watergate at all — so that no doubt he’s got lots of good ideas. But, hell, don’t want to take any shine offa your apples. No, it was you who chose him. And despite his background, managed to get him on your side and portrayed as one of the most well-respected on Wall Street (of course that was the old Wall Street), because as we now know, those bonuses and stuff aren’t too popular right now. Anyhow, brilliant move, you put this man of yours on task for the high-pressured auto trading that you knew would be required to pull off such a heist.

 
 

So you had your guy Paulson, former head of Goldman Sachs before coming to take this position of Secretary of Treasury 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! In fact… oh but then you already would have known this, no? How recently it’s come up that $16 billion dollars came through a German bank, Paulson giving like 45 billion and then having 16 of it come back to Goldman Sachs.

 
 

What a crackup this guy is being. I mean he had everyone fooled, and, in fact, there is nothing at all being said about his involvement or his possible effects on what happened, even to this day. That’s smoothness even you and I could learn from , y’know, Mr. W

 
 

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 upt he 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 ECONOMIC MELTDOWN” (tell me, that part was you, right?) a terminal global economic 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 implied nuclear thing again…”the meltdown”; yea. Doesn’t have to make any sense; I mean economics melting, but hey close enough. How clever!

 
 

I mean that whole image of mushroom cloud, why it just worked stupendously to get us into a war. And now, this being economics… Oh, my God, I see it; it’s like a fifties movie — “Oh, please help, we’re meeee-ee-llll-tiiinggg.” Yea, super scary. Heck, anything like that from fifties horror flicks…just good stuff. Heck, you know that most people believe that stuff anyway. So, I see, you feed them what they always feared anyway. Brilliant. Brilliant.

 
 

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, he’s already living the Wild West out there in Wyoming, course it’d be him? Right?

 
 

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!…

On Cultural Change, Consciousness, and Music by SillyMickel Adzema

 

The Perfect Confluence of Context, Moment, and Person Makes History – e.g., Obama’s Astonishing Rise to Presidency

 

But the Perfect Alignment of a Nation’s or World’s Deep Mood, the Moment, and a Musician or Artist Can Change the World Forever – e.g., The Beatles

 

The Consciousness Expanding Potency of

Will Oldham’s Aural Creations. Welcome, strange new preternaturally profound world.

Your clarity could not possibly have dawned at a better time in our darkening and drowsy world.

 

 

Will Personal and Social Change Synergize Again As Powerfully, As Suddenly, and As Wonderfully Exciting, Beautiful, and Lasting as Before?

 

Like Bob Dylan, Will Oldham has discovered a New Musical Paradigm; unlike Dylan, the Times are only now beginning to catch up to him.   But they have, and the post-Bush era context is seriously Jonesing for such a combination of Authenticity and Fresh New Musical Universes of Mind to inspire and make us whole again.

 

If this Social Context should meet this Musical New Paradigm and its Template, Oldham;

think powder keg potency for cultural flowering and a powerful wind at the backs of the Noble, True, and Heroic the era we’re entering desperately calls for.

 

Another generation brings forth a musical genius, arguably surpassing an earlier one’s Bob Dylan. After so many decades of the world wondering why there has not been a phenomenon such as Dylan since him, and how any person could be so unique, so brilliant that even the closest pretenders only paled, and failed our hopes, a world has given up, and stopped looking. And just at this point when no one any longer is even asking the question, such a phenomenon arises — as Dylanesque as Bob in that Will Oldham is so incomparable to Dylan, so unlike him.  Now, why did we not realize it would HAVE to be that way?  Anyway, he is not Dylanesque at all; he is just, well, like Dylan, in his being so unbelievably, unexpectedly unlike anything we have ever seen or heard on this planet before.

 

Will Oldham, who also goes by the name “Bonnie” Prince Billy, has for years been quietly making musical history outside the mainstream.  His recording sessions are one-shot deals; the invited artists know that they will create music that they will never reproduce the same way again.  For the music that’s recorded is the first and only go through. Oldham also eschews the post-recording tweaking and redoing.  Instead it is stamped and sold, in its “unpolished” state. And if you think that unprofessional then you are probably also the kind of person who would not see why anyone would bother to grow their own tomatoes when perfect ones can be bought at the grocery.

 
 

Will Oldham has that kind of genius; he’s known for a long time that beauty lies not in the precise, the perfect mathematical expression, but rather in the random spontaneous human sense, the intuitive impulse, flash of instinct, occurring without forethought, weaving in or interrupting the intended progressions one is envisioning in one’s head and attempting to recreate on the outside. The polished musician finds that a part of himself, or perhaps it is a force outside demanding inclusion, finds that the actuality irresistibly breaks in, adlibbing, adding the perfect unintended piece that moment seems to demand, or perhaps it is a force inside or outside that shows up unannounced to collaborate, but only during the final scene, the one that counts, as if each moment and only in the  to adlib, adding magic and the unintended to the creation. But this kind of unconscious adlib, which borders the divine, only happens during that one particular playing of that piece.   Any other playing would not have those exact same impulses, any more than any moment can be exactly like another or any snowflake exactly like another.  It is true that not everyone will think that every unexpected straying from the envisioned piece is good, let alone magical; certainly this technique allows that we hear the unintended off-pitch notes as well, also any mistakes in playing will be heard in the finished piece.  

 
 

But there are two things that need to be said about that imperfection: 1st) This kind of production requires a kind of faith in the innate talent of the musicians combined; a more religious person might say it requires a faith in God that what is meant to be produced will be produced, so why second guess the moment? And, sure enough, this does allow for the spontaneous, magical, and unintended that is somehow beyond what any of them envisioned, and so is sometimes beyond what any human has ever imagined, and those moments are sublime. When I hear them I feel a sense of divinity in it; like getting the aural equivalent of a glimpse into divine perfection and beauty.  2nd) Speaking for myself, I grew up in an age — pushed mightily by the modern technologies that allowed it — of music where the perfection of voice, tempo, and instrument was the goal and helped to define one kind of music as better than another. While this impossibility could not be achieved in the recording session, no matter how many takes, it could be produced afterwards through electronic manipulation of every aspect of the production, to make it “picture” perfect. 

 
 

Having grown up with such electronic (sometimes boring) perfection , I thought it added a very rarely heard human quality to Will Oldhams’s music when I noticed some off pitch places in it.  But more than that — and I don’t think I am the only one that feels this way listening to this music — I felt closer to the artist personally!   His imperfection was a crack in the mask that humans all have, and because of this crack I was drawn to the songwriter-singer as much as the song.  I felt, in a way privileged that he allowed me to see his humanness. I don’t think that at all strange, as I feel it is true in our feelings about everything that is presented for public consumption.

 
 

It seems so obvious to me now that the human sounding piece is going to be more appealing to Humans than the polished and perfected ones that I don’t see why no one has seen this before, instead thinking that we wanted mathematically precise art (music) just because we want our buildings, furniture, computers to be mathematically precise. I would be exaggerating to compare the two by using an analogy of live music compared to Muzak, but that is the kind of tendency I see in the manufactured productions. But for some reason Will Oldham sensed all of this, when no one else did… No, not like him.  This is one way that his natural authenticity of person has led him to create authentic, real (one-of-a-kind) music that I deem to be at least as much of a paradigm shift away from his contemporaries as The Beatles were to the music of fifty years ago.  But the thing that makes him the greatest musical artist of our time — like Bob Dylan but much more honest in his lyrics and therefore revolutionary in his influence — is the total authenticity, vulnerability, realness, and fearless self-expression that no one else brings to his art, save John Lennon during his primal phase and Yoko Ono since then and to this day. 

 
 

With his radical techniques, radical fearless self-expression, and his superb musicianship, he is the only musician since Dylan to open musical doorways in your mind to other realities that are far different and more wondrous than you’ve ever experienced.

 
 

While not recognized early like Dylan, his influence may soon be known. For in the post-Bush, Obama era in which authenticity is once again valued, like it was in the Sixties, he stands out in his field, for the exact same reason that Obama did; his obvious unpretentious realness.  Indeed, his prospects for gaining the attention that he deserves, and which the world would be much the better for, may be rosier, perhaps by far, than I first stated pointing to the valuing of authenticity. 

 
 

This is purely my sense, but I feel it emerging and growing and nearing such a point of explosive release into the global zeitgeist as surely as I am able to feel the ground moving and bucking during an earthquake in my home state of California.  What it is that I feel can hardly be contained by a word such as “valued.”  What I am sensing in America is a tremendous amount of energy pent up from the eight Bush years that has not yet found an expression for release.  Sure, there is rage and anger still, but much of that is dispelled by Obama for he pleases and serves in so many of the ways that Bush instead just piled up frustration.  But what is stronger, I believe, is the feelings in Americans built up over eight years in which on what seemed nearly a daily basis Americans learned little by little, piece by piece, and then pile upon pile that virtually every aspect of Bush and Cheney and their administration was, well, at first, covered up by lies, then further on that it was riddled with corruption, and eventually, and still years before he would go, the majority of Americans could see that his election and his administration was perhaps the biggest con on the largest scale any of us had ever experienced. 

 
 

I cannot state it strongly enough; I’ve never observed such intensity and passion in Americans, expressed in the amount of disgust, anger, and the feelings of betrayal.  Not to mince words, it was common that ordinary folks conclusion of all the cumulative corruption and tendencies to act in ways that would not solve problems but only make them worse, often because the solutions would always seem to involve benefitting the in-group as the first priority, was that our government had been hijacked by nothing less than criminals, who did everything solely for ends beneficial to them; worse, that they would only do things that were beneficial to them; leaving all the big problems facing the majority of Americans not like them completely ignored.  Again, I must be blunt and say it the way that no one else will (hiding behind their euphemisms; as a kind of built in denial of their having said it if they are confronted).   No, what I heard will not be filtered through some corporate, or middle-class-sensibility of being nice Matrix.  For what we experienced was no tea party and should not be talked about as if we are discussing art.  So, I must say, bluntly as it was said to me, that some folks felt the Bush-Cheney group was some kind of organized crime in control of our country.   While others put out that such a notion was an insult to the Mafia, for, it was thought,  even the Mafia would not, could not be as completely compassionless and incompetent; nor would they be — as the Bush-Cheney-Rove team seemed to be —  intent on destroying our government, our constitution, our freedoms through the bill of rights, and even our democracy through the scandals of electronic voting machines — produced by Republicans  (Diebold, Corp. to be exact, the President of which guaranteed a Bush win way before the election)   which they, alone,  had sole and easy control over determining what those machines would end up reporting, whether it was the actual count or something decided by them. 

 

And still worse in American’s eyes, that these criminals were protected solely by a kind of tradition and a general feeling — the Congress having decided this —  that going after a sitting President would be more harmful to the nation than the harm being allowed to continue by the administration being waited out.  I think that subsequent events proved that notion wrong.  As for American perceptions, you might call them perhaps not astute enough in sensing the criminality!   As one recent book, which looked into all these unprecedented Executive approaches (again, using a euphemism) to the job of governing detailed that America had devolved into dictatorship during that period.  The idea that we had lost our democracy was palpable, but no one wanted to believe such a horrible thing, so no one would state it, let alone pursue it. 

 

This is just one example of “The Things Nobody Seems Willing to Say” — the title of my blog (but unfortunately I have far more material than I would like for a category such as that, in the wake of the last era, which seemed to keep the American people fearful, in a trance, and the pundits too fearful to do anything but go along with the falsity and the creation of the Matrix — the mainstream version of administration lies mixed with the palliatives of trivialities and feel-good stories — why?  To be able to continue profiting from the ads of the huge corporations that were largely of the same agenda as Bush’s (or Bush had theirs), and for fear of the administration and its adoption of dictatorial powers, but alongside this concession to the paradigm of misinformation, they also needed the support of viewership, thus the palliative feel good, or the dramatized, keep-you-glued-to-your-seat trivialities, such as the blocking out of regular news for hours, e.g.,  while watching a disabled plane on a runway, the passengers not disembarking immediately, and pundits watching with nothing moving.  So, with air time to burn trying to gin up this event, they resorting  to turning the slightest rumor into a 10 minute or more topic of discussion; along with long periods of silence;  and then the pundit’s inane comments, obviously feeling foolish, they grasped desperately at the ploy of hoping to come across as compassionate, clever, or of high moral character in one’s comments. Watching people make fools of themselves, when they have nothing to say, often resorting to little tidbits the plot of which is essentially them as hero/heroine, well that’s the Matrix, and that’s why there’s still so many “things nobody seems willing to say.”

 
 

But that is not what I am writing about now; although I am setting up a context for the remainder of this piece.  And as surely as the McCarthyism, the Cold War with its push toward conformism equaling Americanism in the U.S., and the Vietnam War had a lot to do with creating a Bob Dylan that would (first) push a Zimmerman to become a phenomenon, and (2) create a society that would recognize one; as surely as that same context of conformism, existence of huge corporations of massive, and often monopolistic powers, alongside the Cold War sentiment that would have most Americans welcome these huge institutions as symbols of strength — substitutes for the strong men of the early agrarians period — but with that same sense of playing the roles of good strong Daddies, protecting us from evil abroad, rewarding us with good-paying jobs, a sense of belonging, and in the minds of those they employed especially, a feeling of love toward the corporation, neurotically deflected from their own real daddies, who in their harsh treatment of children at that time, left the young boys starving for the substitute that would give them the love, protection, and strength, and direction, which they didn’t get from their real fathers; and in exchange only asked that same thing of which fathers everywhere ask: that you suck up and grovel and be willing to humiliate yourself at any moment, and that you give up your soul and become instead a corporate man whose soul was equal to that of the corporations, and whose goal and direction were given to them from the outside and were those of the corporation; and a context where the corporations and their lackeys in radio determined for the population at large, as they did for the corporations, what music would be played, — mass produced in advance, and tending toward the palliative, somnolent, and the nondisturbing. 

 

For a country that has lost its soul, feels ripped off from its self and thus from having a life, and they feel themselves to be living half-lives, zombie lives.  So the radio palliatives were ever so important and needed, or as Nirvana (Kurt Cobain) put it, the palliatives were the necessary breathing holes given after you’ve been locked in a jar, so that you can convince yourself you are happy (“but you’re really in the laundry room”).  .And then of course the Vietnam war increasingly became bigger in the context.  This was the context in the early 60s, though I it would be totally unfair to not  mention the very important folk music era of the late 50s and very early 60s — a kind of a first rebellion against the zombie lives, in matching sweaters granted, but which did hearken back to the Depression era and other times of oppression in speaking out for the forgotten in America, the poor, the other-than-corporate, the unions, indeed, the individual.

 
 

That was the American context into which the Beatles came and sang to a young generation that did not want to lose its soul, as it had seen its parents do. The Beatles spoke of an innocence, a male role that was real (“I want to hold your hand.”), and not dramatized, to make up for the fact of not having real feelings, and also as a warning against nonconformism (“Teen Angel,” “Leader of the Pack,” etc.). 

 
 

The Beatles continued to carry America’s youth, with each recording, further from the conformism of their youth, and showed them and sang to them of values of authenticity, realness, and truth, as well as real, not fake, fun.  This thrilled a generation and inspired them to be true to themselves, created a generation gap, and changed the world.

My point is that (1) popular music can be extremely powerful and revolutionary; as the Beatles themselves portrayed it in “Yellow Submarine”:  In the land of the Blue Meanies, which outlawed music, and whose world was dominated by bleak monotone shades and unhappy people.  It was Sergeant Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band, who defiantly stepped forth and produced music, breaking all kinds of Blue Meanies laws.  But the music was so powerful that it brought joy, hope,  and happiness back into the hearts of the people of that sorry land; indeed music  was so powerful as to bring back color, all kinds of color, and everywhere you could see, turning the bleak land festive.  Music as a revolutionary act, powerful enough to wrest control of the land and its people out of the hands of the Blue Meanies, for the capacity of music to help you to feel and thus wake up from zombieness, caused the Blue Meanies, whose control depended on people not feeling, or thinking, or questioning, just obeying and being grateful; well the music had the opposite effect on them, causing them to go mad or to flee far away.   Does any of this sound pertinent here?  Or in our current social context?

 
 

My other point (2) is that, not just any music — for we have seen that music can be employed to induce trancelike conformist behavior — BUT, radically different music than what is currently heard, occurring within a context where change is of the quality of a bodily need and craving, that music which uniquely satisfies that craving makes geniuses of those musicians, turns them into the new role models to follow as paths to regain what was lost and is sorely missed. And turns these musicians into phenomenon that have tremendous power as catalysts in changing culture.

 
 

 So my reasons for stating the current context are that, once again, we are at another extreme context , this one being one where lying, manipulation, and deception were the mode of the Executive Branch, and it was virtually at war with the rest of the government and much of the American people.  Further, that a helplessness and an urge to do something, when nothing could be done, continued to build, for years.  I’m saying that Obama’s success rode on this wave of wanting to do something.  But it was the specific urges that continued increasing and building and that didn’t get released that I believe will be shaping America for quite a while.  Specifically, I believe that it is not just authenticity that is valued again.  I believe that Americans are absolutely dying of thirst for lack of truth, they are starving for lack of the real, I am saying that those 8 years made Americans so to despise the eventually transparent falsity of every act out of the Bush administration that has made Americans of all ages and particularly the young, crave like a drowning man, for the substantial, the real, the authentic, the honest, and the true. 

 
 

Fortunately this is no bad thing and it is certainly better than the complacency that once characterized Americans reactions to the threats against America’s basic values.  It is my hope that it will be strong enough to lead Americans to get their heads out of the sand and face the many environmental challenges that so many of them have wanted to ignore.  Be that as it may, if a part of my feeling only is correct, we may see many Obama type unprecedented events. 

 
 

And I believe that the most likely to benefit from this craving for some truth, in the field of music, will be Will Oldham.  It is because of both the extreme context and the craving it produces in people and the absolutely perfect person who has the perfect message, template for a different way, and a heads above all others talent and refreshing new sounds, which combined create phenomenon in art that then reflect back and help to change society and culture. That is why at the outset I compared him to Dylan, for it is not just his new paradigm music, but that we are, like in the Sixties, sitting on a powerderkeg of context that could turn his genius into something more than profound music affecting the fringe, but could see him as the phenomenon required by our times, just as Obama was the phenomenon required by our times in politics.

 
 

Authenticity and naturalness, and lack of pretention are highly attractive in general to all except those who have deeply hidden or very dark agendas.  But for the rest of us, there is a magnetic attraction to and affection for those, even who we don’t know personally, but who are transparent and self-revelatory.  We feel we can trust them, our hearts may even go out to them as we can even sense their feelings in the fact that they are so open and descriptive of their struggles, and we get the sense, which is the truth, that they are very much like us. 

 
 

So it is my sense and I propose some promising developments to come out of it, just like the miracle of Obama’s win.  But it is Will Oldham that I wish to shine the spotlight on.  My digression into the mood of a country is more to help us understand how such a phenomenon is not already seen that way.  And to that I say that times of deception, greed, and manipulation do tend to make stars out of the corporate lackeys, those who would use any talent they might have in service to the views of focus groups and the like.  But that period is over and I believe that we will see reversals in many more areas of life and all of them guided by the desire to regain the real. 

    
 

Will Oldham is not just authentic, though.  And that is what is so pleasing about the prospects for his music to be enjoyed and to open the minds of so many more people.   For he is like Obama in an important way:  his unrivaled fearless realness is married with superb skills of his craft, an intuitive sense to know where music has not been and to explore, and for these reasons he has inspired others in music, like Obama has in politics.  If he were to become known, and mirror Obama that way as well, I predict that his influence, due to the new worlds of musical pleasure and affect he has opened, would track not so much Dylan’s cultural influence  as the Beatles’ much wider, deeper, and worldwide influence; not to mention the true new paradigm of music they opened up, which musicians from then on looked upon as the standard, with the palliative music of just a short while earlier, gone forever, save the occasional nostalgic trip into denialville that some folks apparently need.   

 
 

I say that Oldham’s influence, if the light should shine his way, would have more of the consciousness changing potential of the Beatles, than Dylan’s influence mostly on music and the political feelings of a generation that was too easily gone with the tide, because having lived through the Beatles and witnessed the change of a musical paradigm, having enjoyed the freshness and inspiration they brought into our our lives (Let’s be honest, now, Yellow Submarine was no fantasy.  I lived under the Blue Meanies in the black and white bleak Fifties world.  And the Beatles did for my world what they showed Sergeant Peppers’ doing in the movie),  I experienced the Beatles bringing such freshness and inspiration to my generation as to create sweeping changes in our minds of what is considered possible, and with that attitude, shared by a generation, we changed the world forever, not in the grandest and most incredible changes we imagined possible at the time, but still, even with the resistance of decades of Blue Meanies, there will never again be the completely monotone world of the Fifties, with all its secrets, and its suppression/repression (though Bush was on his way in attempting such a thing). 

 
 

And that kind of sweeping change, coming from the inspiration of music and the kind of musicians making it, and arriving in just the right spot and just the perfect time, has had more influence than any of the politicians, at any level, has had since.  In fact, I cannot think of a phenomenon of such power as the Beatles to catalyze lasting cultural change coming from any aspect of our society or culture since that time.  I certainly know that I did not experience that feeling of things being able to be completely redone, this time correctly, ever again in the nearly 50 years since. 

 
 

Except….

 
 

I’ll never forget that night — approximately one year ago to the day — one night that changed me and everything.  I came across Will Oldhams’s music completely serendipitously, as I was doing research on the web.  My immediate thought was “What the hell is this?”  I really didn’t know if I thought some of what I heard was crap or incredible.  But I listened to more and found that most of Oldham’s music has an easier entry for the uninitiated.  I was so struck that I checked him out on Google and was surprised to find in Wikipedia what a splash he’d already made in several fields, and what an influence he was on others, and how incredibly prolific he was.  I found out about the way he produced music and his theory on it.  Then I remembered how Dylan was much more an acquired taste for me than was Oldham’s.  I read an article interview with him and began to understand the man more.  That’s all.  With that little bit of understanding removing those outworn and unwanted anyway preconceptions of what music is supposed to sound like, I was free to hear him without  those filters and to hear him Zen-like, first perception-like. 

 

And with that I could not stop listening as I felt that I was hearing hope for another generation to throw off its Blue Meanies.  Will Oldham, without a doubt, was my Sergeant Pepper bringing to the black-and-white monotone Bush-Cheney-Rove America his music. Seven years of disappointment watching Bush reverse the small starts we had made under Clinton in doing something to avoid the coming collapse of the world’s ecosystem, the 50% worldwide species extinction expected in the next few decades accelerating and thus the image of Bush as “What Me Worry” Alfred E. Neumann of Mad Magazine fame, sitting behind the wheel of the bus with all life on the planet aboard, gleefully singing songs, dancing, and pressing the accelerator down so as to more rapidly arrive at the cliff that’ll be the end for all life, as he puts the poor in prison, and creates massive giveaways for the rich, so they will have even more power in putting out misinformation on global warming and the environmental crisis that will (like Exxon was found to have done) increase their profits in the short term as it confuses people and places doubts in the minds of the would be noble spirits, heroes, and truth-tellers that our crisis requires yesterday for our world to have a chance.

 

Yet I saw no Sixties-style rage in the streets. Of the young people, I saw them firmly enthralled with the Matrix view (again) that getting a good job with a major corporation was their route to happiness in life. (So many sad children, with Dad’s who don’t know how to have a heart, give advice, instead of love, and control, instead of respect hoping that Big Daddy corporation will take care of them.) So my mind was bleak as Blue Meanies land.

 

I listened to Will Oldham. I listened also to Scout Niblett also, who has that same authenticity and fearless self-revelation, and who I’ve covered in other several other pieces, explaining the power of her music, her authenticity, and the incredible new worlds opened by her unique contributions. And others from the genre that is called Indie, for Independent, meaning, I guess, that they’d rather do their music than get signed to a label. (Authenticity.) I gradually began to realize that the generation that was going to accept the baton that my generation has been waiting to pass on exists, far more than I realized. I was looking in the streets, when they were all on the internet making their connections, learning, and sharing. Subsequently Obama proved that that was where the energy that formerly would have been in the streets was to be found, and actually having greater impact in that medium than any street demonstrations. I actually felt with glee, the words to one of Scout’s songs “This Fool Can Die Now,” as I felt that the generation I’d hoped would come was already here.

 

But Will Oldham is the elder, the prolific, the groundbreaker, and the vulnerable soul that gets to the truth and gets it out there faster than anyone. I’m talking about personal truth. So it was that night that Sergeant Pepper aka Will Oldham brought joy, hope, and happiness back into my heart. Hope and color came back to my world, as I committed myself to lend my hand too, knowing we had a generation of strong fearless, noble though imperfect, souls arising in the world and already taking the first big steps in revolutionary change, daring to be themselves… finally, that value… realized and understood. I stayed up all night and listened and my grey skies became other-worldly beautiful mindscapes. I knew that a generation with this much creative vision might have the stuff to face the biggest challenge this planet has ever faced.

 

Having put my worries to rest, I just let the music take me. Now, I wasn’t one of my generation to do much with LSD, being too aware of the horrible punishing childhood I’d had as the child of parents who basically raised me to be an extra worker and did not have the capacity to love. No, I took the route John Lennon took — primal therapy — and it saved my life. It also taught me truths, discovered the mystic way, by looking within, that no one else was getting, though they had the keys that made all external knowledge not truly understandable. So my path, which included rebirthing, and Holotropic Breathwork, developed by Stanislav Grof, M.D. the preeminent researcher into the use of LSD as an aid to psychotherapy many decades ago in Czechoslovakia. He developed Holotropic Breathwork as a non-drug technique to expand consciousness and to get the benefits of LSD without using any drug.

 

My point: I have had plenty of experience in “Consciousness Expansion” — of all shapes, sizes, and varieties. Interesting to note right now that one of the main catalysts of Grof’s nondrug technique for expanding consciousness is music… evocative music… music that touches the heart, soul, the feelings… that is powerful in stirring up the stuff inside that most folks think is more convenient to keep carefully held in check, ignored, and put aside.

 

But of course we know differently, that that is what the Blue Meanies would wish of us so that we will be soulless and able to be manipulated. I state all this to as indications of the power of Will Oldham’s music; and to make clear that, because of my personal experiences, when I used the words “consciousness expanding” to describe his music I did it with the firm conviction of a lifetime of experience; which is important because most people would not be able to apply it with the understanding I have, and so would be thought to be using it ignorantly, flippantly, or to sound provocative. And I feel I owe it to anyone who has read this far to provide as much clarity as possible on the ways I am using the words to describe my experience. The reader deserves to be clued in as much as possible – giving my background, for example, so that they might decide the degree of weight to give to the words I use. It occurs to me, for example, that without this understanding the reader might be left confused as to whether I was someone prone to couch experiences poetically, and therefore should be taken in that light, or whether, as is the case, I am describing actual facts and experiences – my feelings being the facts. My poetic sounding words are the only ways I can describe experiences that have no physical components to them, just inner ones. But the analogies I use are the best equivalents to the actual feelings I experienced, and I feel they provide the best entry into my experience, to get at least the most accurate sense that one can, of something that will never be able to expressed exactly in words. That being said, my actions and feelings of that night should provide at least the evidence to conclude that, at least for me, the music had a power on a scale or of a dimension that was unlike any other, for me, in music.

 
 

For indeed I did stay awake all night listening to his music (mostly). And this is coming from a person who, as I’ve indicated, dedicated his life (it’s been 38 years now since I had my first natural altered state of consciousness — a primal — which I had alone and totally naturally, no drugs of any kind.

 

Yet this is the effect that Will Oldham’s music had on this one person in one night:

 
 

I came away from my first journey into the aurally induced mindscape of the Will Oldham universe feeling myself reincarnated “reformatted” one might say these days, within some mysterious, profound vision, which less than a day earlier I would have considered alien. But now I looked around at the world that someone, who used to call himself “me,” saw as a familiar world but only a day ago. But now, after that night it is seen as an alien one; not in a negative or threatening sense, but in the sense of an astronaut coming back to his home planet after many years and after seeing many strange worlds, and thinking, “my this place, once so familiar and real, in fact the definition of real, why, so many other realities, also real, this seems strange. I don’t have a home here since my sense of home includes so much more than this.”

 
 

But though strange, this world now seen, I also feel immeasurably blessed in my having learned of its Jacob’s Ladder-like opening onto this expansive new universe of infinite delicious and wonderfully profound yet firmer-than-Earth mysteries as opened inside my mind through Oldham’s musical alchemy.

 

Consciousness Expansion, you bet! I would not wish to ever see Reality in that smaller way I’d gotten used to. No. How to describe it then:

 
 

I can only say I felt like the first fish who ever made it out of water to dry land and suddenly knew without a doubt he would never again experience his life underwater with the same naïve overestimation.