Ch 18 Dire Prediction

Culture War, Class War, Chapter Eighteen:

Dire Prediction

Paranoid? Prophetic?

So these writings I will reproduce here for your consideration. The entire piece is on the long side, I’m sorry to say, but if you, like me, are a real political junky, I think you’ll find a lot of meaty stuff. Substantial and important zeitgeists of that time are I believe made palpable.

However do keep in mind the date on the upcoming writing. The last date this piece was even touched was, as determined by the “date modified” figure, exactly August 19th, 2000, 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. [Footnote 1]

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 to influence you or anything. This is exactly the way it was, with incomplete editing, mistakes, and all.

Okay, my bad. I feel the need to pause here and to make the most sincere qualification about what I’m attempting to show and how I’m insisting on garnering the utmost I can of integrity and credibility for this investigation. So, we pause for this qualification:

Let there be no misunderstanding of what is written and why it is included, editing incomplete. First, it reads pretty well, as is, as it had a good deal of editing, before it fell through the cracks, as other things came into my life and kept me from getting back to it. But it seems a little choppiness or even confusion around certain phrasings is far superior than to have its authenticity as being the exact creation of that mind of eleven years in the past at all questioned.

So, however you look at it, I neither remembered, but I also did not want to change a thing, and I needed to show that I didn’t, so that I would be believed on this entire premise. As it will become clearer, the fact that this could have been written and certain things foreseen is not just an anomaly, nor is it an ego trip.

You will see it goes against a particular mindset that we’ve been led to believe over the last eight years is all that can be expected of us humans, even when we somehow rise to the highest positions in a government.

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

Ultimately you can choose to be suspicious of its validity, but I can only do what I can to allay as much suspicion as possible. I know that basically you only have my word on this. I can only say that I feel no need to puff myself up nor do I care if you don’t see what I think is obviously there.

And that’s the thing, you see. If you suspect its validity, then the things that it has to teach us and the illumination that came to me, will be lost on any one too suspicious. But then, getting back to Earth now, for what purpose would I pull such a stunt!? After all this is not a high-stakes ploy. What would I be gaining by lying? I could have written this up without bringing in this document, too.

So do what you will. I’m convinced that a little common sense will reveal to most folks that there’s little gained by any contrivance on my part, and that, when you hear the things that this incident provoked in my awareness, I think you will not think them anything but reasonable on their own merits. The document is just a convenient mirror in which we can see things that we mostly know, and here’s the point, that somehow we have been taught to forget, lately, mostly without our realizing it, and since intentional, why it would be done.

Message in a Bottle, Part One
an Audio Reading by SillyMickel Adzema

Here is an audio of the author’s impassioned, sometimes, humorous, reading of this part. Though it is of the first, unedited and unpolished version, and it does not contain all the detail of its current form in this and the previous chapter, it does capture the flavor of it all. I offer it here for your listening pleasure. For the reading of this part, “Message in a Bottle/ Time Capsule, Part One” click on the link to the audio site above or click the link to the audio player here.

http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player.swf?1305835355

Silly Mickel’s Calling The Noble In Spirit: Wake Up Sound Clips
Michael Jackson And The Authentic Life Sound Clips

It’s Not Paranoid if It Really Happens

You need to see this not-quite-finished article to really understand why I would be shocked at what I said back then. One might even say that some of the things I was saying were paranoid. Which makes an interesting point. Here we have a “case study,” actual hard evidence that what would have sounded “paranoid” then is now part of Americans’ knowledge of recent history. So, paranoid or prophetic, guess they can be hard to tell apart.

Anyway here is the untainted mirror into the visions of a mind and its eleven-year ago meanderings. Do parts of it seem really like they are out of today’s news? Why would that be when these two presidents—Clinton and Bush—are so different? And then do you see the huge contrast between the way things were seen then and the way we look at our world today? Any and all comments are welcome. Really astute ones are especially appreciated. It follows:

What They Succeeded in Having Us Believe

It was titled, “Can America Afford to Go in the Bushes?” Subtitled, “What They Succeeded in Having Us Believe and America’s Last Chance to Realize the Ideals of a Generation”

“Stay Out the Bushes!”

Yet Little Talk of Scandal Arose.

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

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

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

This is What They’ve Succeeded in Having Us Believe

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

So, what is my point?

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

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

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

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

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

Message in a Bottle, Part Two
an Audio Reading by SillyMickel Adzema

Here is an audio of the author’s impassioned, sometimes, humorous, reading of this part. Though it is of the first, unedited and unpolished version, and it does not contain all the detail of its current form in this and surrounding chapters, it does capture the flavor of it all. I offer it here for your listening pleasure. For the reading of this part, “Message in a Bottle/ Time Capsule, Part Two” click on the link to the audio site above or click the link to the audio player below.

http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player.swf?1305835355

History Unspun The Smoke, Lies, And Revelations Sound Clips
The Once And Future News Sound Clips

“Believe We Are in Grave Danger”

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 [sic. What was meant was “corporations”] — 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, for 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” walk. 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 primei way of commenting on events is to undo any good in any event that it is reporting on, they blame the lack of interest in the election and the lack of on the politicians. This is what they’ve succeeded in having us believe.

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

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

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

Yet the talk shows are flooded with talk of hatred of Clinton and Democrats and talk of how….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue on this site with
Culture War, Class War, Chapter Nineteen:
Thanks, George Bush

Footnotes

1. I’ve already related about my astonished feelings at having come across this long forgotten piece of writing. But, you see, I knew I hadn’t seen or even remembered writing this. I knew that without question. For some people that might be difficult to believe, but then I doubt that many of those have reached the age of sixty-one, like I have.

No, I’m not claiming, as people laughingly say when, being older, they forget something that they’re having a “senior moment.” For me, it really seems—although this is also meant to be more humorous than exact scientifically—but it really seems that I’ve only got so much room on the old hard drive up there, and year after year, decade after decade, of piling in more and more information on increasingly diverse subjects, to boot, it seems to me, just sort of requires that one has to “delete” some of the older files; there’s not even enough room to archive them.

This is not as silly as it might first seem, for I don’t believe a generation has ever existed of humans who have had more information, changes, and so on, thrown at them over the course of a lifetime, requiring them to learn it or else to slip back in the ranks, not be able to compete on a par, as not even the worst consequence.

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

The point is, you know, just from an overheated outpouring of information coming out of and turbo-charged by the cyber revolution, that we all, in the course of our lifetimes, are confronted with such overwhelming change and information. It is overwhelming in itself, but tack on the fact that you don’t even have a choice in the matter. The advances in technology, just to take one example, require that one learn, relearn, and then relearn something different about the same thing a few years down the line. You know that it’s driven by the incredible changes in computers and the software, but it has catalyzed changes in every other area in our lives, so that everyone, no matter their job, is forced into lifelong learning just to keep up.

I’m not saying anything new here. Why even President Obama addressed this point in his initial campaign when he emphasized the need for societies to have structures in place to facilitate this “life-long learning,” which, as he put it, in the coming decades and with the increasing speed of changes, is going to be ever more required in order for folks to keep up and to stay in the work force as they age.

So this problem is one that was first noticed, perhaps, in the Fifties, when there was talk of the “rat race,” with the image that one never could keep up.

It was stunningly symbolized in the movie, “Brazil,” where one character walking on a windy street is hit by one paper, then another, and they keep sticking to him, despite his fervid, then frantic attempts to get them off him. He gets frantic because the papers accumulate so much that they, gradually but inexorably, cover every part of him, eventually papering over his head, then turning him into a struggling ball of paper, for all you can see; till the struggling stops, the huge ball of paper rolls around a bit on the sidewalk, and then is hit by the wind, whereupon, at first slowly, then increasingly, the papers blow away and the ball gets smaller and smaller—you keep wondering when the man will emerge—but, quite horrifically, I would say—it slowly dawns on you that the person has disappeared, who was inside the overwhelming mountain of paper (for paper, just substitute information). And the papers, you see, are all eventually taken up by the wind and blown away—one last tiny paper tornado swirling on the sidewalk, then it too dissipates leaving . . . nothing. Can’t tell you how many times I felt like that! Can you dig it?

Message in a Bottle, Part One
an Audio Reading by SillyMickel Adzema

Here is an audio of the author’s impassioned, sometimes, humorous, reading of this part. Though it is of the first, unedited and unpolished version, and it does not contain all the detail of its current form in this and the previous chapter, it does capture the flavor of it all. I offer it here for your listening pleasure. For the reading of this part, “Message in a Bottle/ Time Capsule, Part One” click on the link to the audio site above or click the link to the audio player here.

http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player.swf?1305835355

Silly Mickel’s Calling The Noble In Spirit: Wake Up Sound Clips
Michael Jackson And The Authentic Life Sound Clips

Message in a Bottle, Part Two
an Audio Reading by SillyMickel Adzema

Here is an audio of the author’s impassioned, sometimes, humorous, reading of this part. Though it is of the first, unedited and unpolished version, and it does not contain all the detail of its current form in this and surrounding chapters, it does capture the flavor of it all. I offer it here for your listening pleasure. For the reading of this part, “Message in a Bottle/ Time Capsule, Part Two” click on the link to the audio site above or click the link to the audio player below.

http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player.swf?1305835355

History Unspun The Smoke, Lies, And Revelations Sound Clips
The Once And Future News Sound Clips

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Culture War, Class War, Chapter Nineteen:
Thanks, George Bush

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Culture War, Class War

Ch 18 Dire Prediction

Culture War, Class War, Chapter Eighteen:

Dire Prediction

Paranoid? Prophetic?