Saturday, October 24, 2009

Dead Leaves in a Leftist Hate-Storm

This is what passes for Democrats in America today:

Republican Congressman Connie Mack sent out a press release on Sept. 8. His [press aide] received this reply from John Guerra, a reporter for the Key West Citizen in Florida:

“The Republican Party is now a mentally ill group of people who want nothing more than to destroy Obama’s first term no matter how much the country needs his policies. I despise your party’s activities and the hatred you spew on Fox and other sounding boards for the insurance companies. Please don’t you dare get him killed, which is the underlying goal of you right wing nuts.”

Via Big Government, which noted: “We have reached out to Mr. Guerra for his version of events. No comment yet, but we will keep you posted if we hear anything.”

http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/2257

The reporter at Key West Citizen is listed in the staff box as: Education & Social Services: John Guerra

I think that there is a frenzy in the West that is bubbling over the top into genuine madness. It hardly matters what the subject is, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Haliburton, oil companies, Christians, Jews, Israel, Sarah Palin, "global warming," or anything the Left decides to discuss, they scream that they are absolutely right and those who question them are evil. It's a religious frenzy. These people are seriously dangerous now, and they'll become moreso in time. It's a Leftist hate-storm.

There's a reason for it: those who rage in this frenzied state are getting a kick out of it. It makes them feel good. They like the intensity of the emotion. It makes no difference to them that it makes no sense, they aren't in it for sense. They like the thrill of the rage. It's for people who have nothing else, no personalities of their own, no real emotion other than what they can scrape up from others, sentimentality and cynicism. These are empty and sick people. There's one reason we should care:

They are Death hippies getting a lot of normal and decent people killed. That comes with a price-tag. They have to pay for this. They don't get it. but they will. Nothing is free in this life.

It's very hard to love these people, even if they are our own. It wasn't always this way. But today our own are some of the most vile people on Earth. Mabe Jacques Prevert was thinking of collaborators when he wrote the song below, sung by Juliette Greco:

Packed of Old

I tried to have a conversation recently with a 20 year old. I probably won't try that much from now on. I finally realized the person I was speaking with was a child only a few years prior, and now considered himself to be a god. Not his fault, I guess. His self-esteem is high, and what more can a kid want from life?

I was about to explain dhimmitude by way of referring to the Pact of Omar. Then I had a strange thought. I asked the kid not about Omar but if he knew of Saint Paul. I drew a blank there. Now I listen to music and contemplate death. Shows what I know.

Friday, October 23, 2009

Weather, we live.

I don't now recall the sequence, whether before my adventure or after, a girl hiking with friends got separated, and within a half hour or so was found dead from heat and exhaustion. A lack of water; a lack of shelter; a young woman dead in minutes. Those who claim to "love" nature fill me with disgust.

I spend a lot of time in "nature." I'm not dead yet partly from more than ordinary luck and partly due to my fear of nature. Nature is the ultimate... shall we use a metaphor? -- psychopath. It is a mindless and cold killer. It has no intention, and it kills. There's nothing to love. Face fast-approaching death by dehydration and see how much love you have for nature. There's nothing to feel anything about. Not love, not hate. It is an endless emptiness of force without purpose or point. Yet, there are those times in those places where there is more than brute-stupid nature: there is the Mystery. Part of that Mystery is music as made by ordinary men. Here's one now. Below we'll have a chance to listen to the same music in a different way and sense again a furthering of the Mystery.


Cool Water as done by Hank Williams

Rick | MySpace Videos


I like people as a rule, and some I truly love. Because I love some people I am willing to kill others and stop their Earthly existence altogether. Some things I can control. Some I cannot. Sometimes I try and succeed, only to find I wish I hadn't. Such is the nature of living.

Here is some copy from Covenant Zone, posted by and some written by Truepeers.

The question is who controls? Nature doesn't control anything, it just is as a force. People act within it in life. They die. To be at the mercy of a force that doesn't matter is, for some, too much to bear, and they, feeling a need to be the Reason of the universe, take on the role left by the vacuum of nature. Dying alone in the sand under the sun is pointless, and so too is living for no reason at all. We can sort out some of the elements of nature and use them for our gain, but we can't do everything. We can't do everything but we have to do something. Woody Allen points out that nobody beats the house; but we should all give it a go till we lose the last hand and cash in our chips for good.

What game should we play? Some, as we see below, play the game of little gods. It works till they find themselves without water, a pretty common commodity till there ain't none. And then one realises just how dependent we are on nature itself, for simple things like water to drink to live. One might control the machinery of death and bathe the world in blood for the good of all in times of glory and plenty; but if the tap runs dry, then one would give the world for a drop of water. It makes one acutely aware of ones triviality. That's not the whole story.

[F]or a Kingdom of This World to be complete, it is first necessary that God should not exist. The Universe must be closed. The Party’s word must be final. It is imperative that the Last Prophet should have come. The book is ended and the ultimate words are written, not as an earnest of more to come, but as a grant of absolute power to those who rule on the earth.




[D]ostoevsky might have said ... that for everything to be permitted to the State, then God must not exist. If God does not exist, then the State is free to organize against man. The ideological imperative of global warmingism is this: even nature must be brought into the political system. There is no “out there” there. Not God, not Nature. Not anything you might want to call the Creator. Everything is subject to the political process. Man must control the climate. If the climate goes bad, it is because our politics is bad.


Truepeers writes:
[W]e need to allow ourselves to explore the anthropology of the human concept of "God", not to diminish the basis for real faith by attempting to reduce what cannot be reduced to systematic knowledge, but to create a greater faith in the human ability and necessity ever to expand the degrees of freedom in our shared systems and forms of sacrality.


http://covenantzone.blogspot.com/2009/10/wretchard-on-fire-testament-to-truth-of.html

I ain't so fancy. I know that a man can kill every living thing on the planet and smash the planet itself to dust by pushing a button; and I know too that the same man can crawl till he drops in the dust just because he hasn't got any water left in his bottle. A girl dies; a man survives. In the end there is the Mystery.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

We could be heroes

I know the truth about the evil people, and I know that I am a hero. If you don't believe me, just ask me. I am certain.

Limbaugh is a Christian fundamentalist fascist. He is the last gasp of
a dying movement - Republican Neo Cons.

I don't know ANYTHING about this latest controversy but I know that
the Far Right is working itself into a FRENZY trying to discredit
Obama.

I also know that the USA is PROBABLY doomed as a result of
fundamentalist Neo Con Bush rule over the last 8 years.

Are the Liberals the answer? Maybe not but I told you clearly that
Bush would financially ruin the USA and he and his policies did
exactly that. He and his party lied and cheated and stole for personal
gain at every opportunity and still you supported him.

[....]

I believe Obama is the last best chance that the US has for emerging
from years of national mismanagement and corporate greed.

One last thought - I believe that Christian Fundamentalists are just
as dangerous as Muslim Fundamentalists - they are all TOTALLY FUCKING
CRAZY!

Perhaps we shouldn't talk about this shit.

I know I am a hero and that I will fight the evil people and die for the Good. I am real. I know.

Jesus looks at the Pharises and says, They are building magnificent monuments to the prophets their fathers have killed.... They are saying, 'If we had lived in the time of our fathers, we would not have joined them in killing the prophets.' If you transpose the saying, you can see that Christian anti-Semitism is the same thing. The Christians say, 'If we had lived in the days of our Jewish fathers, we would not have joined them in killing Jesus.' Or today you have the incredible self-righteousness of the new generation toward the generation of the second world war. The younger generation say 'If we had lived in the days of our fathers we would not have joined them. We would have been so heroic, vis a vis the Gestapo, that we would have all died rather than surrender one inch of our innocence.'

Rene Girard, "The Scapegoat: Rene Girard's Anthropology of Violence and Religion." CBC Ideas Transcripts. Toronto, Canada. 9 March, 2001.

I know that I am a hero. I know this because I know myself, and I know I am heroic. I ask myself, and my answer is that I am a hero.

‘Look, they can do what they bloody well like,’ declared the youth, vaingloriously certain of himself. ‘I don’t give a tinker’s damn for any of ‘em. Far as I’m concerned, they can go and get knotted.

He was sitting on the draining board, his feet in the sink, eating pickled gherkins from a jar. As he spoke, his companions solemnly nodded their agreement and approval. The house was full of young people, boys and girls, all very vociferous and very sure of themselves; sure of their ability to stand out against authority and of their willingness to face death rather than fight for a cause they did not believe in. On the chairs and the tables, stretched out on the floor, squatting in the corners, in the kitchen, the salon, the bedroom, this band of young rebels shouted their agreement.

‘It’s not our war!’ cried a disembodied voice from beneath a table. ‘We didn’t start it, we don’t want it, and we’re not going to fight it!’

‘People are dying every day, in their thousands, and the poor fools don’t even know what they’re dying for—‘

‘They torture them at the Gestapo. People are scared to open their mouths and tell the truth anymore,’ declared a young girl who was not quite as young as she looked and was doing her best to seduce a nervous youth who was still a virgin.

‘Well, I’m not scared!’ screamed a fragile-looking creature from his position on top of the unlit stove. ‘When my turn comes to be called up I shall tell them exactly what I think of them!’

‘Hear, hear.’ Muttered his companions, while the nervous youth took off his spectacles and vigorously polished them, rather alarmed at his won daring at being in such company.

‘What happens if the Gestapo comes?’ queried some faint-heart sitting in the passage.

‘Let them come!’ A young boy seated on the kitchen table, who was in the habit of declaiming dramatic poems that he learnt by heart, threw wide his arms and faced them challengingly. ‘Let them come! What do we care? The world is our oyster… and this land is our land, because we are the future! They can’t force us to fight and destroy ourselves!’

One Sunday morning, five months later, their weekly meetings were brought to an end by the sudden arrival of three men. Three men in leather coats, wearing shoulder holsters.

The nervous youth, who greeted their appearance with shrill screams of hysteria, was silenced by one sharp slap across the face.

The young girl who was not so young as she seemed, and who never had succeeded in seducing him, managed to spit out a couple of obscenities before she was kicked in the stomach and pushed to one side.

The boy in the sink had moved to the bathroom and was making love on the floor with his girlfriend. They were separated with a few well placed prods with the butt end of a pistol and sent downstairs to join the others.

The poet wet himself with fright the very moment the intruders arrived. He offered no resistance of any kind.

In a long line, shuffling single file with their heads hanging, fifty-two boys and girls left the house and entered two green coaches that were waiting outside. The world was their oyster, but fear was an unknown quality and they were meeting it face to face for the first time.

For three days they were retained at Stadthausbruke No. 8. Their treatment was not particularly harsh, but it was enough to simply be there; it was enough to learn the meaning of fear and to understand that courage had no place in their lives. Courage was for those with power.

After three days they were put into uniform and sent off for training. Several died during the preliminary courses of instruction; some through accidents, others because they chose to. And as for the rest, they battled on and tried to come to terms with their new situation and their new selves; tried to grow reconciled to the fact that when it came to the point, they were no different from all the other poor idiots whom they so heartily despised.

They didn’t want to fight. It wasn’t their war. They hadn’t started it and they didn’t believe in it. But they fought, just the same.


That’s a passage from my second-favorite Danish Existentialist philosopher, Sven Hassel, Assignment Gestapo. 1965. Trans. Jean Ure. London: Corgi Books; rpt. 1973; p.p. 110-111.

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2008/02/drop-in-river-of-time-1.html

I am a hero. I am a hero. I am a hero. I know I am a hero.

Gunnz and Mother's

There's a lot of nostalgia for an imaginary 50's of gee-whizz and golly-shucks, as if it were ever so pure and innocent, and girls never said "Yes!" till their wedding night. Gunn me down, daddy-o.


Henry Mancini, "Theme from Peter Gunn"


It's all class, the coolest hip and the hottest swing on the back side of the sixties. Man Oh Man. The cats are crazy and the chicks can dig it. Just down the steps, grab a table, pull up a listen to the jazz at Mother's. Waa-waah! Waa. Smooth jazz, easy and smart. The fifties: when guys had haircuts, wore suits and fedoras; the gals in tailored dresses, high heels and hairspray. The hoods were snazzy and sleazy and died in gun fights on rain-slick streets with the cops blazing justice; the homeless were hobos who guzzled Thunderbird by the gallon and died in ditches on the wrong side of the tracks on the far edge of town. What a happening time it had to be.

Father Knows Best? Ah, to be at Mother's with Peter Gunn.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Descent into the River of Time

Teddy Robin & The Playboys - Younger Girl 196x


The kids doing this tune were probably far older than I when I first heard this. I don't even remember girls from that age, only trout fishing, sitting on a boulder under pine boughs on the lake side, casting my fly for time after time, the motion and the grace of the arc of the line and the art of the fly sure to attract what I would then, as I do now, think of as love.

That was some time ago, the younger girls I now know being grandmothers, and the prey I seek, jihadis, my mist-shrouded riverbanks and stone-heart mountains, my own mind.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Man in a Shared-Shape World

I made my way on foot along the river to the army barracks to find my lodging. Along the way, down a pretty scene of century-old broad leaf trees shading a paved walk-way and iron and wood benches upon which sat geriatrics unafraid of anything life could throw at them any more, down the way accompanied by sniper fire, those old people not even flinching at the shots, maybe too deaf to even hear them, I found myself thinking of my grandparents, all of them born over a hundred years ago now. Both couples stayed married from early adulthood till death, maybe, as Woody Allen points out, like pigeons. Maybe, as one might think, like people who had relationships with each other they refused to abandon no matter what. And they had their "what."

One couple: My grandmother told my father to get his father from the tavern and bring him home. She gave my father, a young man at the time, bus-fare, which he looked at in disgust. He said he couldn't bring his father home from the tavern on a bus, he needed taxi fare, which he got from my stingy gramma, reluctantly. Hours passed, and my gramma finally took a bus to the tavern to find out why my father and her husband hadn't returned. She found them both drunk on the taxi fare. She told them both to get out of her sight an never return. They left for America.

My father met my mother, got married, and here am I to write this anecdote for you. But here's what I find interesting: My grandmother found my grandfather. They remained together for sixty years, minus a few year in the middle. Because time is always time, and place is always place; but some people see it whole as one.

My mother laid in bed dying badly, and my father, long gone, came back, and he sat till she died. 'Cause he and she could see the hole in the world of life. It's a hole one falls into alone, no one there to pull you out again. And there you stay.

And my girl, a constant Scot, went walkin', and she never returned, and she won't, and there's an end of it.

I met a fellow young and savage who says he needn't marry for the sake of paper and society's recognition of his relationship's legitimacy. Hear, Hear. He doesn't need anything, nor not nobody neither. He knows what I don't know. He knows what nobody knows but him knows:
How to fill the hole in a heart-shaped world.

Nothing is Pure

For the average Modernist twenty-year-old a new beginning is likely an exciting venture, a new beginning, in fact, and an opening into the unknown. For one twice that age, a new beginning is just a repeat of the old, a new begining of a new old. Newness is old. There is nothing new under the sun. All is vanity.

Hey, little sister, nothing is pure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AofzLsvTsM0

But there is witness to the repeat. There is the blood-crystal vision of the same this time round and times to come and times to go and to return eternally. But nothing is pure. One might hope for a memory of a nice day for a white wedding. But not for nothing pure.

Monday, October 19, 2009

To God's Country Through the Night

I'd been on the road for a few years, all over the world, and had returned to America for a time, finding myself riding with a stranger in the night, one more driver helping me on my way home. By then, even at 17, I'd seen a lot and knew odd things and strange things. The man in the driver's seat asked me quietly if I ever got lonely after years like this, travelling, alone, not having seen my home in over two years. After a time all people look the same, and all voices sound alike and everything is more like more of the same only different but never home and never real and never ones own. He asked. Usually guarded in my conversations, I said, "Yes, sometimes it's very lonely on the road."



He slowed the car and came to a stop, and he said, so quietly, "See up there on that hill-top? You go on up there and you'll find lots of friends, like it's home."

"What is it?" I asked, as I climbed out of the car and grabbed my backpack.

"That's the nut-house," he said.

Lost in an Eternal Circle

Leaving never brings anything new to play, just a place one hasn't been before that's the beginning of old again. It makes monogamy attractive.



We might well all have loved too many and only later realised how it's the same as not loving at all.