The times that try men’s souls

These are them.  But I’ll take just one small immediate snap shot, since I don’t have much time, trying though what little time I have at the moment may be.

If you find yourself waking up as a slave, having slept poorly, dreading the wake-up hours too early, stomach filled with acid, do not despair.  You will be tempted, as I am, having slept poorly, needing a few hours more sleep, alternating coffee to wake up and Tums for the acid, to cry out.   No need for that.  It won’t help you anyway.  This is a day you have to remember that your soul is no slave, and your dream of freedom will keep you moving forward, that an isolated trying day does not a trying lot make.  Even a string of such days does not mean the end of your dreams.

Sure as this drenching thunderstorm that is hovering over the area for the next 48 hours, sure as the wildly unreasonable  demands you will be asked to meet as soon as you arrive soaked and shivering, doubled over, trying to catch your breath.  Take it to the bank that today’s beating will end, you will recover, things will be fine and your food will taste good again and the sloshing of acid in your nervous stomach will be a distant memory, if that. 

Do not worry about any of this.  Do you see me worrying?

TEST

This post is only a test.  In the event of an actual post, there might have been some actual content here.  But this is only a test.  I accidentally subscribed to this blahg while mucking around on the company iPad, I want to see what happens when a person becomes his own follower.

In the empty stadium

The pitcher winds up, back to the batter, corkscrews around whipping a 96 mph heater toward the plate with tremendous movement on it.  He sprints in a flash to home plate, grabbing a bat in one motion swinging and sending it to the deepest part of the park, on a high arc into the seats.  But racing to the 410 sign, slipping on a glove as he does, he is able to time his leap perfectly and, reaching 18 inches over the wall, pluck the ball out of the air before it can descend into the stands.   Falling to the ground after slamming into the wall he manages to stay on his feet, takes a stride and throws a strike back to the first baseman, on a fly, and doubles up the runner who had taken off at the crack of the bat.  Double play!  He makes it half way down the first base line where he kicks the dirt, the bat again in his hand, and curses the fucking centerfielder, who a second ago was him.

All this drama is watched impassively by 50,000 empty seats.  The seats, truly, could not give less of a shit about heroics on the baseball field.

Torture– drop the word casually, it means little

People who know me, who’ve been to this untidy, dilapidated place where I live, would all agree I have many more important things to do right now than stew about politics.   I know it is a symptom of something else, but I can’t clear my throat sometimes.  There are things that stick there like poisoned steel wool, irritating to no end.   So let me try to pump this one up, like a cat with a hairball, and get on with my life today.  

President Change You Can Believe In (you can also believe in the tooth fairy or the patriotism of men willing to torture suspects– so he’s not really misleading anyone)  casually spoke the word “torture” the other day, I heard the sound bite.  He admitted explicitly, for the first time, that our great nation had descended to torture in the so-called War on Terror.  Torture was committed in secret, in our names, against people who are abstractions. It was authorized and justified, under a changed name, in secret memos, with surprisingly little legal support, that were authored by Bush Administration lawyers, one now a federal judge for life, the other a tenured professor of constitutional law at Berkeley.

It’s not like there were witnesses as actual people we know were hung by their arms for hours at a time, forced to soil themselves, stripped naked, kept in freezing cold or boiling hot cells, kept awake for days at a time, kept in airless cells too small for them, thrown against walls (harmless, just to get their attention!) shaken, punched, slapped, kicked, water-boarded.   Some of these people were guilty as hell, even if many were not.  At any rate, full disclosure, agents of We The People tortured people, we’re not going to do it anymore, and that’s that.  There’s no point prosecuting anyone, heck, we’d probably have to prosecute ourselves too, which would suck!  In addition to posing an uncomfortable conflict of interest.

It was as shocking hearing the president finally say “torture” as it was hearing the word “poverty” come out of his mouth for the first time in public during his second inauguration.  I heard it like this “we murdered some people, frankly, we did,  in cold blood and without any real legal defense for our actions.  We also engaged in systematic rape, of men and women, some admittedly quite young, and other atrocities.  We killed babies, and old women, we broke down doors and beat up and sometimes slaughtered people in far away lands who had nothing to do with terrorism.   We grabbed people in airports that we sent to savage regimes to be tortured and found out only years later that many of them were innocent.  Guilty as charged.  These things are terrible, unforgivable, and we abhor them to our core.  I say, not without some personal sadness, that as a practical matter we will never hold anyone accountable in any way for any of these policies.  We made sure that our contractors are immune from prosecution, and we sure as hell are not going to prosecute the wealthy and powerful men who created the secret torture program.  Get over it, America.”

“After all, we are wealthy beyond counting, as a nation, but 21 million of our children go to bed hungry every night, is that not in some ways a greater national shame than torturing people we don’t even know?    We have neighborhoods where the death rate is as high as in third world nations engaged in civil wars.  Shit happens, people.  I say these things not because I will hold anyone accountable for crimes we committed in the past, for the crimes we continue to commit or for a system that allows the wealthiest to increase their wealth beyond the wildest imaginings of the greediest while children, by the million, are asked to eat shit and die.  I mention these things only because I am a man of conscience and an expert in constitutional law.  If you think it is easy to be an expert in constitutional law, think again.  I challenge you, for example, to find the three discreet phrases buried in that succinct document that formed the constitutional basis for human slavery and its strict legal protection for almost a hundred years.”

“We do some very bad things, I will admit.  Most of these terrible things we keep secret.  You have 1,000 channels of TV programming to distract you, a fantastic network of professional sports where some of the greatest athletes in the world compete for your enjoyment, many fake news channels, a hundred Darwinian contests, scripted reality TV shows with colorful people in many cases even dumber than you are.  You have great stores full of wonderful products and you can buy anything you like on-line, from the comfort of your favorite chair.  You have everything you need, unless you’re really poor, or working class, in which case you may feel left out of the American Dream.  I pity you, I really do, it’s really a great dream.”

“But I must also point out that I will be very, very strict with anyone who tries to make public things that the public must not know.  If the U.S. military has a digital video of an American helicopter crew getting permission to gun down unarmed Iraqi civilians who come to try to rescue other civilians shot down by that same American helicopter crew, that is their business.  The military knows best how to deal with these things, it has been doing so for over two hundred years.  Things like this are classified for a reason and anyone who releases such information is a traitor and enemy of the state worthy of death.  And guess what?  As we’ve already shown, we no longer need to even accuse you of a specific crime or have any kind of due process before we take you out with a flying remote control death machine.  Thank you for listening and God bless these United States of America.”

“Oh, and one more thing.  Vice Admiral John Poindexter, a shady character out of the Iran-Contra scandal and former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Reagan, was pitching a data mining system that could be used to keep tabs on the activities of conspiracies to undermine America.   It could be used, for example, to get the names of everyone opposed to a specific government policy, the phone numbers of everyone involved in street protests or petitions, those subscribing to internet lists or those organizing for any purpose that might run counter to the best interests of America as defined in secret by unaccountable persons.  I am not at liberty to say if the NSA data mining program recently revealed by a traitor worthy of death, a reckless and dangerous young man named Edward Snowden, is that same program Poindexter was peddling or not.  Does it make any difference to you?  God bless America.”

“And goodnight, Gracie.” 

Invitation to Writers

I invite anyone reading these words to take this quick challenge:  

choose something that makes your heart beat stronger.  Write it down, explain in a sentence why you love it, then run with it.  Let it take you where it wants.

Say music is the passion, the beat, bap! with the right note laid thickly against it, there’s nothing to compare.   We call things “like music” in order to convey ineffable levels of grace and delight.   Without music, just noise.  Music sweet music, soothing savage breast and beast alike.  On the wings of a song, every desire anyone ever had.   Without music, no dance, and gone, most grace.

Or take, say, logic.  My passion is logic, so needed in a world of competitive noise, senseless violence and a troubled dance for human connection — to clear a path through the chaos for a moment’s relief.  Once I’ve grasped the logic of something at least I’m no longer perplexed about the cause.  Take Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting a different result.  We’ll use that for a thought experiment:

Assume I tell you the same story one hundred times, the same beginning, great excitement over unlimited potential, same middle, everything going fine but something nagging, inevitable as death, same treacherous cataclysmic ending.  Identical in each story are my actions, virtually interchangeable the other person’s actions.   That I take pains to weave this seamless chronicle of betrayal would tell you the larger story of my life.  

You can predict that these repeated experiences with disappointment, the tremendously built-up hopes always dashed in a close variation on the same cruel theme, will leave a person more susceptible to bitterness than the average person.  Here’s a hypothetical to flex between your back teeth:  a possible cause of compulsively repeated painful behavior. 

Imagine the case of character A_________.   A_________, the youngest child, is routinely ignored at the dinner table.  His older siblings hold forth, sometimes pick on him when the parents aren’t around, punish him when he squeals on them, his parents dote on the others, and often tell him to be quiet, wait his turn.  A kid in this situation may easily begin to feel starved for affectionate attention.  There are millions of people in A_________’s  basic situation, in every culture, on every continent.  

The random people they interact with will make all the difference in how their lives turn out.  A mother or father who is generous, calm, one who listens well, or that kind of grandparent, or best friend, or teacher, alleviates a lot of the child’s pain as the child grows up.  A parent who’s overwhelmed, angry, preoccupied will not do as good a job in this regard.  All parents are some fluctuating combination of these and other types.  

Unless A_________ gets some encouraging outside help, he will grow up convinced that basically people don’t care about him, perhaps nobody cares about anybody.  He can give you a million examples from his own life of why this is so, with ten irrefutable illustrations of each example.  A____   is like my father, perhaps, whipped in the face as an infant, somebody who may realize, after a lifetime angrily defending himself, that he never stood a chance in this world, that it wasn’t his fault.   Or a thousand gradations, from atrocity to inconvenience to tolerance and calm.

Maybe it’s a passion for interpersonal relationships.  Most readers and writers do what they do out of a desire to connect with others.  Words from my heart, through the light filter of my mind, into your eyes, back to me.  It’s magic – sending messages of power and complexity through symbols we’ve evolved to make units of meaning we call words.  Language is a miracle, created by that deepest human need, to love and be loved in return. To be understood, and cherished, by another, a yearning that goes all the way back to earliest animal consciousness.

That’s why babies are always so much cuter than their adults.  They are created to be lovable to their parents, so the parents will take care of the baby while it is helpless.  Babies of every species who are not as cute have tended not to survive and reproduce.  Intelligent design, wot.

So the invitation is open, and I hope you all will take it, and drop a line, or better still, leave a comment below this one. a comment others could feel free to add on to.  I am flooded by Zora’s oldest of human longings, to make myself known to another.  In cyberia, that takes on strange and mutated forms.  But hey, might as well dream. 

 

Want to Feel Sick?

Here’s a cued up portion (9:00 for mac users) of one of the videos Bradley Manning is on trial for turning over to Wikileaks.  He’s already been locked up since May 26, 2010, his right to a speedy trial notwithstanding, facing a death sentence under the 1917 Espionage Act.   My father is shaking his head in his grave, uttering his famous “doesn’t it make you glad to be an American?”

Collateral Murder

Only Time I’m Happy’s When I Play My Guitar

Cream had a song called NSU that contained this great bit:

driving in my car, smoking a cigar, only time I’m happy’s when I play my guitar

No idea what NSU stands for, but, dig it.  If I could spend most of my time playing my guitar I’d be a much happier camper, no doubt about it.  Yet, somehow, three days  sometimes pass when I don’t so much as pick up my guitar (though I sleep next to a tenor ukulele every night that Sekhnet’s not next to me– and it is rare that I don’t at least play the uke a little as I’m lying in bed).

What’s up wif dat not playing the guitar, though?

It’s not that I’m too busy cleaning up the mess on my desk, or kitchen table, or chair, or floor.   It’s not that I’m a workaholic rushing straight ahead in a crazed, glassy-eyed pursuit of greater income and success.   What the hell?   Why don’t I play the guitar three hours a day?  

One of the great mysteries of my mysterious life.

Freedom and Politics

My nephew had a good point to a teacher in Florida recently who was pressuring him to speak the words of the Pledge of Allegiance along with his 17 year-old classmates.   “What kind of pledge is it if you have to repeat it every day, year after year?  Once you make a pledge, you’ve pledged.  What kind of bogus, insecure pledge has to be repeated daily?”  The teacher’s reaction is unknown, though my nephew was excused from final exams because his grades were already too high to calculate.

$150,000,000 a year to keep the remaining 166 prisoners (of a total of 779 at one time incarcerated there) locked up at Guantanamo.   This includes 86 cleared for immediate release, people not currently charged with being anything like the worst of the worst, many charged with nothing.   Also at Gitmo is a group of 48 who are probably dangerous haters of our freedom, capable of exacting bloody revenge and even more motivated now than a decade ago when they were first grabbed.  

The problem with these dangerous haters is that they have been tortured by agents of our great democracy and so any trial or attempt to prosecute them would  bring what was done to them into the harsh light of public scrutiny.   So we can’t really try them, or release them.   They truly, truly hate us.

The president, quoted in June 10, 2013 TIME magazine: 

[History] will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism and those of us who fail to end it

An eloquent echo of Thomas Jefferson’s famous observation about how he trembled to consider the harsh punishment a just God would rightfully inflict on those, like him, who owned human beings as part of their personal wealth.

And, like our current eloquent president, Jefferson was instrumental in not ending the practice he deplored.  

Jefferson would have been just as tormented, I’m sure, by the innocent children killed in the targeted drone strikes the president continues to order.  He would have been as concerned about the 100 hunger strikers at Gitmo, 35 of whom are being restrained and force fed twice daily in what the UN Commission for Human Rights has condemned as a violation of international law.  The World Medical Association has declared doctor supervision of involuntary force-feeding unethical.   I suppose they would say the same of physicians who made sure prisoners were not accidentally killed while being subjected to a technique that made them experience drowning in a most visceral and convincing way.  In spite of our best efforts to keep these people alive, nine of them died in Gitmo.   Things happen during war.

I can hear the chorus of freedom loving Americans, and I understand.  Not our fault!  They hate our freedom!  And what about all those innocent people the terrorists they might well be associated with, or are at least sympathetic to, killed?  The UN, bah!  World Medical Association, foo!  How easy it is for the world to cast its judgments down on us, the hypocrites!

I also understand why the trial of Bradley Manning must be kept as quiet as possible.  He will be given a fair public trial, even if much of it will be in secret, and then convicted of betraying this great nation.   Manning disclosed some documents and videos that made the American military look very bad.   Such behavior must be punished harshly and publicly (even if the trial is not) to deter any other would be “light shiners” and people of “conscience”.  

What business was it of Manning’s if a helicopter crew laughed after killing some unarmed civilians in Baghdad, reacting like the machine guns and tiny humans sited in their scope were part of a video game?   Who is Manning to judge that Americans in harm’s way can’t blow off a little steam once in a while?  It’s not like plenty of other civilians weren’t being collateral damage while this particular, insignificant accidental killing of an unfortunately located Reuters camera crew and unarmed Iraqis coming to rescue wounded civilians happened.  The incident was marked classified for a very good reason– WE DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO THINK BADLY OF AMERICA.

I heard recently from the author of a book about soldier misconduct in Vietnam that the My Lai Massacre, for which Lt. Calley, for his part in the slaughter of hundreds, was famously court-martialed (and eventually served 3 years under house arrest), was one of dozens, if not hundreds of such slaughters of Vietnamese villagers during the years that American soldiers fought an endless war against a popular underground army.  

American boys were subjected to terrible things in that war, by a merciless and cunning enemy, things nobody should ever see.  If a few of them snapped and murdered civilians from time to time, well, the Army considered that something we should take care of in-house.   It was taken care of, in all cases but My Lai, by classifying the reports.  And it worked, the accounts of these mass murders remained secret for 40 years or so.  

The author persevered and after a long, grim dance, got these classified reports of other massacres.   He visited the villages decades after the atrocities to interview those who remembered.  There were plenty of Vietnamese who remembered.  The author reports he was struck by the absence of hatred toward him as an American.  The survivors seemed grateful for the chance to tell an American their stories.  It took more than a year for the slaughter at My Lai to come to light, after some traitor or another made it public, after choking down the memory of it night after night, month after month.

It is amazing that the reports of these massacres that the author eventually read were not destroyed, as is routinely done now with compromising evidence (think air controller tapes from 9/11, secret non-sworn testimony given by president and vice president to the 9/11 Commission  that was not allowed to take notes or reveal what they’d said, video of detainee “enhanced interrogation” etc.).

Let us all be prudent, then, and patriotic, and wait 40 years or so before opening the can of worms that this private, entrusted with keeping classified information secret, prematurely and disloyally pried open.   To paraphrase Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, one of the architects of our highly successful overthrow of a brutal and secretive dictator in Iraq to build a free nation in the Middle East, a bulwark against hatred of American freedom and a beacon of democracy to a world mired in ignorance, superstition and poverty:  What we don’t know can’t hurt us.  Or, at least we won’t know what what we don’t know did to us, since we didn’t know it was even there, really.

Moment of Contentment

Many things are beyond human control.  My friend who surgeons have been cutting at and other oncologists have been pumping full of poisons in an attempt to prolong his life comes to mind.  Woke up one day with a mysterious lump on his backside.  Did you ever hear of soft tissue sarcoma?  I hadn’t.  It’s apparently rare.  The form he has is a rare form of a rare cancer.  They throw darts at a dart board to treat it.   After his first round of chemo the doctor was very serious.

“The tumor has doubled in size,” said the oncologist.  “I think we should try another chemo regime.”

“I think so too, doc” said my friend, sitting uncomfortably on what was left under him to sit on.  They’d told him they’d removed all the cancer when they cut out several pounds of his flesh.  They underestimated cancer’s craftiness.

Why do I type Moment of Contentment and launch right into this horrible story?   Partly my nature and partly to point out what it is.  In the midst of this death by a thousand cuts my friend can still laugh sometimes.  Needs to laugh, more than most.  He has always had a great and infectious laugh too, with a taste for slapstick, the bizarre and the not too drastic misfortunes of others.

When I had the headphones on last night, adding tracks to a mix with a tiny portable USB keyboard, and I’m playing drums, bass, electric piano, more percussion by hitting the small keys of a flat little keyboard that weighs a few ounces (and cost $50– the Korg nanokey 2, if you’re interested) I had a thought of my friend, a great musician who nimbly tickled the ivory with Fred Flintstone fingers and how this little keyboard might be the best present he could receive (assuming, of course, that the neurological damage produced by the chemo still allows him to play) .  

I’m talking about the moment of contentment where we are doing exactly what feels best to us.  The moment we wouldn’t change anything, or, like when writing here when we can change exactly and only what we don’t like and leave only what we do like.  

Not every moment of contentment produces something to share, there are things like letting a cool breeze blow across your face on a hot day, closing your eyes, with relief caressing your face.  There are all the little things we do that produce nothing but a moment of contentment.   These moments are nothing to sneeze at, especially given the world we live in today.

Now back to our regularly scheduled headaches…

10,000 Kicks

I saw a quote from Bruce Lee recently, my man Bruce Lee.   “I do not fear the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks.  I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”  Dig it.

My father could have been woken from a sound sleep, been urged to put on a suit and rush over to the funeral home.  On the trip, even if the place was close by, he could compose a eulogy in his head to make the mourners cry, then laugh, then cry again.   It was a talent he had, something he must have given a lot of thought to at some point.   I saw his notes for a eulogy, five or six words on the back of an envelope.

He was not a professional eulogist, if there is such a job, but he was a very, very good one.   

His example may not be the best one for our purposes here, because it was somewhat innate in his case.    I am thinking of the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.   If I sometimes spent ten hours straight playing the guitar, it was not to improve my playing, it was because I couldn’t stop.  And because I couldn’t stop my fingers got more and more warmed up, I stumbled on new possibilities, parts, voicings for chords, ways to strike the strings.  So love of the thing made me improve, because the playing was  so much fun for me.  The discoveries were an organic part of how much I love to play.  Same with drawing.

This blahg is a kicking board set up in front of my cottage in dreamland.  I come out each day into the fog and kick the board once, softly but with great focus.  I stand and breathe in the cool, wet air.  I kick the board again, harder.  Then I kick it again.  After a while I am kicking the living shit out of the board, smiling as I recall Bruce Lee’s smirked rejoinder to O’Hara, the evil bully, breaking a board in front of Bruce’s face before their fight at Evil Han’s tournament.   “Boards don’t hit back,” says Bruce Lee curtly before bashing O’Hara directly in the scar on his cheek inflicted by Bruce’s father the day his sister committed suicide after fighting off O’Hara and his lecherous bully friends.

Boards don’t hit back.   But if you hit a board correctly a few thousand times you get the hang of it in a way that people who kick things randomly have no hope of ever kicking.