Congenial Speak #60

It's Their Funeral

Now is a good time to live. It is even a better time to die. This administration, this thought policed mentality of a out-foxed nation, this configuration of a democracy on the verge of extinction has given people no reason to live. People, for example, with ALS, with cancer, people whose days are numbered by the availability to affordable health care, can choose to lay down and die. They did, mocking a tragic end, on the floors of congressional bureaus. If it's really the end of free will, of the God-given talent, the smile, the option to laugh and wish your servants a warm time in hell. Just pessimism gets you there, sitting in a sterile room in a wheeled chair. Wondering whether to allow an extra hour to get your taxes done next fiscal year, whether your child will survive CHIP's ending. Or, the glass is half full, the GOP cooked its goose, democracy will prevail and we'll just have to hunker down for, at the very least, another year. People will have to suffer through one terrible holiday season, a bleak new year, one they will remember for the rest of their lives. It is kind of a spin on It's a Wonderful Life, the rare version in which George gets a windfall and Uncle Billy dies because his health care got too costly. That song, that anatomy of the human spirit, its saga. That dichotomy drives me insane these days. All the way one can see “a time to live and a time to die,” “a time to reap and a time to sow.” That was ripped right from the omniscience of the bible. Save for the title and the final two lines, the song is from the third chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes. It is a little known story—so I am telling it here—Pete Seeger added the sentiment, the suggestion, the other-worldly idea, that there's “a time for peace on earth, I swear it's not too late.” Let that sink in; let that shrink the arrogance of the biblical lip-servers and hypocrites born with every elephant cycle of gestation. A mortal man, a Democrat, a “Communist” who served his country had to edit the bible. He had to, in the frays of a war started immorally, protracted by greedy politicians, remind them that there did exist another option, that it was not too late.

I think the shrewd reader can see where this is going. That, without the guidance crutches of GPS, bookmarks, or breadcrumbs, my next sequenced step is clear.

Picture an epic mural, a massive all-ensconcing piece of art, a display of philosophy that by sheer coincidence bears a bold connection to the humanities. Imagine that, during the seances at night, in the backrooms of Georgetown watering-holes, where senators join hands, once more, each decade, to pay homage to the dead. To nod their heads in glib recognition of those killed or cut short of future Christmas's; at their hands, in their words, in their deafness to constituents, AT PAUL RYAN'S GAVEL SLAM. Trace the connections, follow the money there. And there are the dots, schemata, blueprints for a civil or world war, or both. From the Lincoln Memorial, behind the pillars, eyes study the terrain. The 16^th president stares at where his party has gone, what it's become, where it could go, and yes, how it may be too late. The peace Mr. Seeger spoke of in the late 50's came at the beginning of Vietnam, when it was still that Second Indochina War, at the tip of the slippery sloping iceberg, when each year it became a little easier, less culpable and tangible, for a Congress to draft young men to a probable death in an uncertain war. It was not too late then, in 1959, in 1960, when Eisenhower (a General war hero and all-around good Republican) warned Kennedy (a war hero and all-around good Democrat) about the constant threat of Communism spreading. Well, you know the rest. How the lies surmounted, gathered objectionable acceptance, altered reality and compromised journalism for the next decade, until the Washington Post published the “Pentagon Papers” in early 1970. History writes this stuff. It is documented, or at least a watered-down version of it, in text books, now on the internet subject to fanciful Wiki-creation, for the next generation. For prosperity. How is it so different? The players obviously differ, but the plot and motives are essentially the same.

The peace I write about is less objectified. It is a set of door hinges, a boxed set. The peace I refer to faced its biggest threat on January 20,2017, when a hustler from the streets of NYC said America was a dumpster fire and he could make it as great, again, as it was in 1886 when Alexander G. Bell created a means of communication. The policies create havoc, they breed animosity, violence, guns, belligerents intent on war. In short, that man on the capitol steps, swearing a lip served oath to the empty bleachers on Pennsylvania Avenue did start the fire. He fans it with every tweet, with appointment of the least qualified people for the job, he fans it by pandering to his base. Here was this extreme narcissist with an agenda: To plunder America. He scammed that gullible quadrant of the country, that populace that cheers NASCAR and cooks meth in their garage. The one that now has to swallow their pride and admit that Obama made it possible for them to get health care for a few years, made it possible for them to get help after the meth lab exploded or Jr. lost a digit lighting fireworks, showing his loyalty to America.

Hypocrite's gestation

Early next year the kids on CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program) will lose their heath care. It was not renewed. The program did not get the necessary attention (money) to keep it functioning. So much was invested in the tax scam, the overhaul that would make Reagan ashamed to be a Republican, so much emphasis was put on the reverse Robin Hood zealots, the pirates that took over the White House. Things look bad for Alabama, southern state that exist to be the go-to places to rally support. Bastions for voters with a deep sense of remorse, preachers of right to life for fetal means. If 2,000,000 kids lose their health care, families have to go on food stamps to feed them, pay medical bills, make choices of whether to feed or medically treat their kids. Ah, back in the womb, things were so nice and those prospects of human beings had rights. The unborn are “worth” more. A righteous moral high ground is lapped, within the uterine walls, with so much amniotic fluid. The unborn, the idea of a base in the name of religion saving them, giving them a fighting chance, allows a narrative to be created. A highly contentious, volatile, debate is offered to which no living, potentially productive child can compare. In a nutshell the unborn child is exploited for political gain. And once again the bible, religion, something that by definition is designed to bring people together, to echo compassion, to take the heaviest burden from those struggling to make it, succeeds in creating a divide. Saving an unborn life is a smoke screen. A time to live, a time to die; months to be unborn and leave politicians to scheme and lie, to cast away stones that hold them in real time, and lobby for donations and 5,000 dollar a plate dinners. Time for special interests, for the NRA, to create the next Sandy Hook. A time for war, a time to tweet little rocket man threats; a time to dream of an adopted homeland, where birth-er movements don't exist, a time for the ill, the blue-collared, the veterans, the seniors, to get what they paid into, a time for America to stop trying to exploit the middle east like. . .the unborn; a time for peace, I pray it's not too late.

And finally, to leave this world, to abscond with a sense of self and let the rest fend for themselves. There must be something bigger than ego, than politics, than a trail lined with money. In the fickle fates of old-school candidates, the struts and dancing gavels of clairvoyant magistrates; looking at how the world spins, each time they hiccup from caviar, how they win and drink champagne in the Rose Garden . . . It is a good time to live, but to die is nye, ripe, youthful, sinister, a leftist plot.

Congenial-speak#59

He saw it, Axis, Filters, and All

I was thinking of John Lennon yesterday, of what's transpired in the 37 years without that voice, that perception, for whatever reason, of an immigrant. He saw something in America, in NYC specifically, that made him want to live here badly enough to take on Nixon, Liddy and a government that wanted him out. Five years he fought to stay in America, all stemming from a bogus drug charge in England in 1968. On July 27,1976 he emerged victorious with a green card. Two years earlier the man who saw his presence in America as a threat to “democracy” resigned “for the good of the nation) before an impeachment trial would likely have ended in conviction. John W.O. Lennon saw something in America worth saving, worth imagining, worth throwing out the despots that every score or so float to the top of the filtration system.

Lennon first came here at the height of the phenomenon know as Beatlemania. On the 7^th of February, 1964 the four sat in the Pan American terminal in JFK flippantly answering questions of how they found America (“turned left at Greenland”). I do think that in all seriousness Lennon found the reaction to them as a group “not normal.” That inhuman reaction, that devil-detailed music that made girls swoon, scream so loud that the Beatles (accepting the amplification of the day) could not hear themselves, lost some momentum, some of that rebellion against good old puritan values, in 1966. Lennon, as the most thoughtful, forthright mouthpiece of the four claimed that they were more popular that Jesus. The words did not sit well in America's South, in states like Alabama where next week a child molester might go to the senate. John Lennon's statement which, as he put it was more true in England than America, prompted the burning of Beatle records, staged marches of the KKK, and death threats to individual members of the Beatles. All because it was said off the cuff that something was more popular than religion, at that time. That was America's Achilles heel. Lennon was perceptive and pointed it out. Something was sacred then. I'd wager now if a Beatles caliber wave came along, and a statement was made suggesting that it was more popular, temporarily embraced more that religion, nothing would be said. Even in the Bible-belt.

Achilles in 2017 wears his heel on his sleeve. The bar has been raised to indeterminate heights or simply removed from its precarious rests above the port-a-pit. I listen to a song like “Happy X-mas (War is Over)” and I'm deeply moved, saddened, seeing a grossly bleaker world perhaps than Lennon had seen. It was in the “bitter end of the war,” after Nixon had vowed to try things LBJ had never thought to do. I listen to the song and can only think of the fact that in 46 years, as we cycle toward the holidays, the perennial time for reflection on good will to all, we are fighting one war that beckons lessons from Vietnam. From the beginning, when the French were fighting off the Communists, to 1960 when America “took the baton,” a critique was that the region's history was not well known. America, much more than the French, was ignorant. By 1967 any understanding of the region, who's loyal to who, a clear object, had pretty much eroded away. The US government began lying to keep the war going, to save face, to. . .preserve a political base? Any war or global conflagration fought today will be done with fathoms less insight into history from a commander in chief. Lennon saw something in America, from his first taste of its insanity, its hypocrisy, insecurity, its denial of true nature of man. As he fought to stay here, he found paranoia, he watched Watergate, seeing a tyrant deposed. In 1971, as he and Yoko took to the streets of NYC, financially supporting Yippies, America still had the insecurity, the denial of who they really were, a fear of an outsider exposing them (Nixon, Liddy) for the frauds that they were, for the lies they were precipitating in America for the good of a chosen few.

The Real Celeb, the working class hero

I argue that John Lennon, in his own right, was the least phony artist of his time. He was brutally honest, perhaps cajoling America to be honest with themselves. They did not like what they saw, retreated in the warm cocoon of the bible-belt (libel) and re-wrote the book, re-phrased the article, asked journalistic integrity to take another hit, CHANGED the narrative. At a very young age Lennon had to chose between his parents, and the one he chose copped out on him and was later killed by a car. He had problems, was insecure, was a very angry youth. Lennon was moved, quite literally, by America and, in the last years of his life, used his celebrity to show it where it was. Some say he was a phony because while preaching love and peace he had been an absent father to his first son, fought with his first wife, and lashed out at the media. By 1980 Lennon had been through a kind of therapy known as Primal Scream, rid himself of all the negative baggage that caused him to appear a fraud, and was raising his son by Yoko Ono, acting like a father (mother if needed), and was writing music not angry, not overtly political. Like almost all of the Beatles's songs the music on Double Fantasy and Milk & Honey is about love, either his for life, of his son, for his wife. They are autobiographic and optimistic and do not attempt to comment on the state of America or the world. That is why, to me, his slaying at age 40 was doubly tragic. “The Monster” had gone. Lennon I surmise would have gone on to be a well-adjusted musician, activist, and family man. He saw something (then) in America worth saving, worth arguing over, an idiosyncratic nail whose head he hit in a misquoted 1966 comment.

Measured Karma

Personally, he saw the world, he saw America for what it was, for what it could be, for what it desperately, pathetically, wanted to be. There is a story that “Blue Jay Way” was written about George Harrison's visit to Haight/Ashbury during “the summer of love.” It was the height of the counter-culture, the short-lived excess from nothing but music and drugs, ending that October with the staged event Death of the Hippie. Harrison reported what he'd seen. The wasted hippies clamoring for LSD, vowing to disavow material goods. They were, by his account, dirty, starving, going nowhere. Something less than a third of America had joined the summer of love, grown their hair, gone to San Francisco by any means possible. I mean it was small, a tiny percentage of Americans chose to really rail against the establishment, to totally blow off the doors of democracy as it was known (drafting men, forcing them to fight an illegal war), to permanently change the national paradigm of how we treat one another and how things are prioritized. If it turned out that the trickle of Americans who banded in the Haight in 1967 turned out to be roughly the same as the Americans who stay loyal to their base today, that truly would be something. You can not get more empirically full-circle than that, intrinsically twisting ideologies like the famed double helix. It is all in that DNA. If that happened, if we advanced past opening the door (ajar) to Nazis, Confederate sore losers, let child molesters make laws, sparred with N. Korea until doom, opened another box of Pandora in the middle-east and then the camel broke the straw pole and the percentage was like 1967's. I think even John Lennon would have found it remarkable. He may have even said that, after five decades of economic experiments, wars (decisive and protracted), social programs, all while the control group's in church every Sunday, it's proof that the trickles in the world are more popular than Jesus.

Congenial-speak #58

Where Fools Rush in

I think the White House is an Adult Day Care Center. The closer one gets to the oval office, the more the adult supervision dissipates, tends to recede into the woodwork in search of the grace under pressure of Dolley Madison in the hot summer of 1814. I get an image, a quixotic reckoning to the movie One Flew Over the Coo-coo's Nest. Few of those characters at the ward had to be there, as few in the White House have ever truly stood by Trump. They are all insane by proxy, living a life of delusion, paranoia, and self-loathing all for the survival of a barely recognizable GOP base, an elephant most of them would shoot only for its ivory. As in the movie, Trump is the outsider like RP McMurphy (Nicholson's character) who goes crazy, is crazy, gets lobotomized and then, well, has a date with a pillow. Kelly Anne Conway is nurse Rachet keeping it real (or fake) but keeping everyone there, the grand enabler.

America needs to take a good look at itself. I grew up seeing democracy fighting for a place, fighting for blacks, for women, for a way to end a war. From Civil Right Acts in 1964 to Watergate democracy integrated blacks (on paper) and forced a tyrannical president to resign. It laid a standard that no one is above the law. The president does not make them and he—or she—can not break them. In Ten Years and Change I wrote about a time when democracy was displayed to me at its fiercest, at its most utilitarian, as the most useful sharp tool in the shed. LBJ was a Democrat. That said, Trump was one as well. He ran as a Republican he said because they would be stupid enough to buy anything he says, to stay at his hotels, to buy his daughter's things made in China. He played an entire ideology

for a bunch of saps, rubes, the lowest, most cogent, human denominators; greed, lethargy, fear, pride. He sucked everyone, from the General who listens to him like he makes sense to the marine private saluting him. I would give a marine 50 dollars if they altered the salute with one finger. I mean, what the hell at this point, at this total eclipse from reality. Well, partial eclipse. I have never gone there, and most people I know won't. But at least a third of the country, most of the WH, all the marines, police saluting and securing him, when they know full well he would not break a sweat for them. He would not put down his golf club to execute a logistically reasoned raid or bother to make a fuss when they die for him and the country he, and they, swore to defend.

GPS

Who cares to see the BIG picture, the one that's projected after Trump and maybe McConnell's generation are long dead? Will they ever spin in their graves? How can they top themselves. Let's be optimistic, cautiously, and say in the year 2525—as in the song—all those things in the song are true, but humanity has finely come to terms with itself, they figured life is too short to keep fussing and fighting. Thanks to America, to Trump rejecting the Paris Accord in 2017, the world is given a prognosis of a decade (that could cause WWIV). But, as most people think of MLK, RFK, JFK, FDR, Lincoln, Regan, even Nixon rolling in their graves now, in 2525 as America rejected how Trump made it better again and chose instead to take care of each other, give everyone an equal shot (basically what Sanders has been stumping since the 1980s) would the earth move? Would it feel the rotation of dead tyrants, martyrs, extinct polionic speakers who tried to take away health care from millions? Will the tug of war, the battle of the two-parties, a dichotomy of errors exist in the year 2525 “if man is still alive?” Actually that is the foreseeable future. That will be the second chance to have a woman in the WH after the embarrassment of 2016, the blemish, the erosion of sanity, decency, of morals by a perversion of a party who preaches them. A decaying of scruples to the point of sending a man who as a private citizen would have to register as a sex-offender (unless Alabama let's one marry their second cousin) to the senate.

The Bent Spoon-fed Theory

The world is bent, the insanity ripples across the pond to the very people who have long abandoned monarchy as a form of government as far as having the first and last word on anything. Germany maybe empathizes with us. Hitler came with most of the defects Trump has and set about creating a world that is unimaginable to humanity. A world that, for the 20^th century, looked quite behind its time. It was a regression of humanity to a classified and killing state. After the Civil War, the counter-productive efforts of Reconstruction, Jim Crow stripped constitutional rights away from the black man. In a way, the laws mirrored the Nuremberg laws. Democracy was always at work, though, somewhere in the heart of America, above the Mason-Dixon line. Somewhere in America, during the Great Depression, through the Civil Rights Movement, through women's efforts for equality, to DREAMers' wanting fair treatment, in America there is always some group that shall overcome. There are always voices that come though the night, disturbing the giant as he counts money. At the 1968 Democratic convention, when thousands of draft-age students protested an immoral war the whole world watched, and the tear-gas used to disperse them seeped in, disturbed quasi-hawk Hubert Humphrey in his Hilton shower. The people are heard. Democracy gets through. It finds a way. It trickles down, up, in, whatever preposition seems appropriate.

The Germans did Bomb Pearl Harbor

The fantastical world, the kool-aide drinking cult, the lynch pin who'd sign any bill for applause, the Trump period in history will be remembered like Watergate, the Vietnam War, it will go down as a reminder as the time when the governments' lies became par for the course, when the line between fact and fiction blurred, merged to one clear picture (SMALL) all the pathetic deluded paranoid men and women, void of any integrity, saw. Seriously, America has taken leave of its senses. Or is this an existential warp of time? Can America survive anymore, as a union? Maybe it is time for America to secede from within, to reject each other and live in our respective realities. We could have Real America and Trump-land, West of the Rockies (they'd be the first to fall off). But would it work, could the so-called haves get a long without the existential have-nots. They might have to put down their golf clubs to mow a lawn or clean a toilette once in a while. I really think Trump has brought democracy (and elephants and tigers) to a dangerous level preceding extinction. Jim Crow differed mostly from the Nuremberg Laws because there was no plan that succeeded it. (Until 1941 there was no real plan in Germany.) No one wanted, except maybe your KKK and fanatics, to commit genocide in the blacks case. The Germans tried eugenics with Commission #3. The point is America never set themselves up to fail with a “Final Solution.” That was arrogant, thinking it is possible to snuff out a group of people, an ethnicity, a race. Did the Germans ever read Darwin or Mendel? What doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Suppression of a race or ethnic group can have a positive (for them) effect. Today your white supremacists argue that Jews and blacks are taking over, that Jews control Hollywood and the banks. Well, if that is true, who put them there? Who created the situation that may lead to such supposed domination? From having Jews as money lenders in the Middle Ages to antisemitism forcing them on the Borscht Circuit to McCarthyism and blackballing, the WASPish michigas has put Jews at the top of some fields. Conservatives created that hunger, that drive, that NECESSITY to get ahead. Suck it up Republicans, your ancestors made your bed and now you lie in it. Now, with beady, red, meth weary eyes you saw an opportunity, your savior, one who could make lies a reality, fact fiction. He hustled you Roy Moore confessors in AL into thinking he gives a shit about your welfare.

Now could be the time, the ripe moment, when the hanging fruit has turned sour enough to discard. It is spliced democracy juxtaposed against a mutation of Republicanism, a hybrid of fascism, autocracy, oligarchy and a bit of kleptocracy to sell it. Now is the time when all good men confess to their assaultations of women, double check reality, echo loudly the First Amendment, survey land east of the Rockies, and write our final solution