Protecting the Status Quo

The demonstration called for Sunday, 17th June, in support of Julian Assange, is one of the most important and urgent for many years. Two days later, it will be six years since Julian was forced to take refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

If he steps outside the embassy, it’s more than likely he will face extradition to the United States on concocted charges of espionage. What this means is that he and WikiLeaks have performed an extraordinary public service by revealing the lies and crimes of great power. This is true journalism.--WSWS

If I have to see or listen to another halfwit denigrate Assange as some sort of enemy of America on corporate TV,  I'll slug that sonofabitch in the face.

That includes the entire American ruling class of dimwits and their blogging faithful.

You fucks, Chelsea, Snowden and Assange all did you a favor and you don't even fucking know it.

You know why?

Because you're stupid fucking jingoists.

Ha, ha, ha.  Gotcha!


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Burns Blew It

Many VFP members have first-hand knowledge of the broad anti-war movement, some as participants in the active-duty G.I. resistance where they conducted peaceful protests, sabotage and outright mutiny, and some in the civilian peace movement after their military service.  Nowhere in 18 hours of programming does the G.I. resistance movement merit mention and “instead of honoring the civilian peace movement for its accomplishments, activists are generally belittled as self-interested and self-indulgent, with stress on its supposed deep antagonism toward American soldiers,” the ad protests. 

VFP concludes its ad, just above an iconic photograph of protesting G.I.s holding a banner emblazoned with, “We won’t fight another rich man’s war,” by saying that if the Burns/Novick series is “crowned with an Emmy, this defective history of the Vietnam era will become required viewing for generations of young Americans—a seductive, but false, interpretation of events.”--MF

My take is Burns and his collaborator wrote and presented another mythology.  No Pentagon Papers, no examination of the interior of military resistance?

After resisting the war and then studying it in detail as an undergrad and beyond by delving into innumerable enlightened texts, such as Michael Herr's Dispatches, Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War and many others, I knew Burns had sold out.

This happens when you get a big contract from PBS to write a corporate-friendly version of reality.

Keep those donors away from the fires, tell more lies, and life goes on for the comfortable war-makers while the soothing myths expand many times over.

FWIW, I didn't bother with the doc.  I knew it would be awful.


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Kill List

Locked and loaded and able to kill anything that moves.

Regime change and the promotion of "democracy" around the world never had it so good.


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Recent Dishes from the RBP Kitchen

From the top, I found a deal on 2 1bs of boneless pork ribs. Parboiled for an hour, skillet-browned in butter with garlic and herbs.  Threw some BBQ sauce on those babies, mixed, served over rice, sprinkled with olive oil.  Bang!  Not as good as outdoors, but okay.

Next I boiled up my pasta, sauced it up with tomato, added cooked spinach (with onions, seasoned). Finished with olive oil...  Bingo!  It lacked something...andouille sausage perhaps?

Eggs scrambled soft, no meat.  Herb and garlic pots. No meat?  Hey, we're trying to stay healthy here at RBP... But wait, I finished it with ketchup?  Kapow! Thas' old school ain't it?  No BS.  Are you okay with that?


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Will Power and Glory

They ran the Indy 500 today. 

Sorry for Danica. She's earned her babe status no matter what.

My Indy story from 2014.


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Yep, Rep. Peter King is a Moron

King said he believes the anthem-protest movement is based on a falsehood, as was Nazism. The kneeling movement is based off a “lie” that there’s anti-black policing going on “and the statistics don’t show it,” King said.

“You shouldn’t be disrespecting the American flag no matter who you are,” he said.--Newsday

There is no "anti-black policing going on," right?

Not telling you anything you didn't already know of course, but Rep. Peter King is a dunce.

His home town on Long Island is 98% White.  Shit for brains.

King Whitey's District.  Every town has 11,000 people?  Bullshit.


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Yep, Perez is an Idiot

Cuomo, meanwhile, has secured endorsements from former Vice President Joe Biden as well as former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

In a series of tweets, comedian and writer Gabe Gonzalez said, "Perez has always placed party loyalty over progress," and concluded, "If the best Cuomo can do is muster Hillary, Biden, and Perez to endorse him, voters should seriously ask themselves whether he's the candidate to guide NY into the future."--JC

I think Democratic elites wouldn't mind another term of the Orangutan as long as it means they can continue to put up the fraudulent "resistance" as a talking point and maintain control of their corporate donations and the status quo.  It doesn't matter if they win or lose important governing positions, as long as they have their little dollop of power.  Their overall malfeasance sickens me.


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Known Fact

A key component is missing from the current controversial discussion surrounding football players and the national anthem. In the recent days of argument over whether NFL players have the right to protest racial inequality and systemic injustice in the United States, few have brought up the fact that less than a decade ago, professional football players didn’t even appear on the field during the national anthem.--EN

Like everything else in the U.S., patriotism is bought and sold on the open market. The sweetheart deals among major professional sports franchises and their billionaire owners and the Department of Defense are rich, concocted lies.

If a couple of international hoodlums like U.S. Sens. McClain and Flake are capable of ascertaining why this is a poor idea, you'd think even more people of questionable intellect might get the point.

Though their qualms sadly aren't focused on the moral aspects of this arrangement, budget talk is better than nothing.

The entire spectacle of what happens pre-game in virtually every major sporting event is a calculated charade, propaganda par excellence.

Any thinking athlete or fan feels the fraudulent nature of the "patriotic experience" at hand. The NFL "kneeling" protests are obviously emblematic of that.

There has never been a better running back or home-run slugging first baseman alive than the ones concocted by the jingoists for the purpose of exploitation--patriots number 1 and 2.

I don't care how much money professional athletes get paid for this nonsense, they're being used if they buy into the ruse--it's simply more stupid billionaire arrogance, and our prez is exemplar.

Here's your other reading for the weekend.


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high concept

How to make a name for oneself in the art world? Every up-and-coming artist has to face that intimidating question in one way or another, but Robert Rauschenberg, now remembered as a leading light of the pop art movement, came up with a particularly memorable answer. When in 1953 he got the counterintuitive idea to make a drawing not by drawing, but by erasing, he at first tried erasing images he'd drawn himself. This brought him to the realization that not only should his erasing constitute more than half the process — "I wanted it to be the whole,” he later said — but that, to make a real artistic impact, he'd have to erase the work of someone important.--CM

The Human Eraser.


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Roth Dies at 85

The greatest American writer to never win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

For me he was spellbinding, in the same manner as Dostoevsky.  Every line was the truth as far as he knew it, even in his handling of irony.

RIP, Philip Roth.



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Chilean Poet

In review I've discovered he became something of a craze and sensation posthumously (the usual story), but a friend recently introduced me to the Chilean poet/novelist Roberto Bolano (1953-2003).

Give him a go if you haven't already.


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The Varieties of Atheism

John Gray is a self-described atheist who thinks that prominent advocates of atheism have made non-belief seem intolerant, uninspiring and dull. At the end of the first chapter of his new book, Seven Types of Atheism, he concludes that “the organised atheism of the present century is mostly a media phenomenon and best appreciated as a type of entertainment.”--PF

I found this to be an interesting read.

In other words there's a whole lotta dogma to go around.


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The Word

This is a doomed tactic, but one that is understandable. The leadership of the party, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez, are creations of corporate America. In an open and democratic political process, one not dominated by party elites and corporate money, these people would not hold political power. They know this. They would rather implode the entire system than give up their positions of privilege. And that, I fear, is what will happen. The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way a bulwark against despotism defies the last three decades of its political activity. It is the guarantor of despotism.--CH

As usual, Chris Hedges has the word.


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Haiku/RP Thomas

     
         











          her bare feet on the
                                                         
 plymouth dashboard dripping from

          a dip at the creek


          flathead roaring home

 vinyl beer and the fire chief
                       
          waiting at the door


         I like the smell of

 hot summer full of this girl

         lilac to the brain



--RP Thomas 



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Read and Give

The key component of this presidency is the same as that which has been inseparable from at least the majority of his predecessors. The main difference which is disgustingly and unavoidably central to Trump’s presidency is his vain, brutishly honest expression of his (and most presidents before him) lack of integrity between his words used to get elected and his actions after being elected. This slimy method of misrepresentation is made uniquely Trumpian by the crudeness of his interpretation, but his rudely indifferent wording is, perversely, a more  honest expression of what is the long established method of operations within the global corporetum known as the “USA.”--CTS

Good stuff here, and a boatload of more good stuff.


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Old Man in a Stained and Tawdry White Suit

On Tom Wolfe.

I liked his journalism and art criticism enormously, but found his novels a slog, though I did somewhat in the end and belatedly, after I burped, enjoy Bonfire of the Vanities.

Come to think about it I bought a lot of Wolfe, helping make the fucker rich.


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Mr. Fish

Mr. Fish is the Truthdig cartoonist.


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Bruce Cockburn

Suggested by RP Thomas.


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Holy Land, Holy Shame

Tom Clark's blog.

Deep background.

Chris Hedges suggests a film.


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History of Whitey

From time to time, Americans will talk about the mass killing, treaty-breaking, impoverishment, and forced removal or assimilation of Native peoples in the U.S. as “a shameful period in our history.” While this may sound like the noble acknowledgement of a genocidal crime, it is far too half-hearted and disingenuous, since these acts are central to the entirety of U.S. history, from the first landing of European ships on North American shores to the recent events at Standing Rock and beyond. An enormous body of scholarly and popular literature testifies to the facts.--JJ

Exceptionally well done, Whitey. Whitey is a curse.  He lives everywhere. My old friend CL has always been fond of pointing out the exceptional white qualities of his peers, the whiter the more annoying. 

He acknowledges and measures the degrees of whiteness in everyone.  America is snuggled up in a white blanket like a babe.  America is a shit-hole country of whiteness, dontcha know?


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HST

In his best journalism, it’s often hard to distinguish between lucid reports of actual events and his wildest hallucinations. For Thompson, there was a special benefit to choosing the drug you used when reporting a particular experience – whether it was a presidential campaign, or a sequin-fraught Debbie Reynolds stage-show, or a convention of boozy district attorneys watching propaganda flicks about the dangers of marijuana. Drugs could either help you comprehend the madness or maintain your sanity. Gonzo journalism wasn’t simply about getting the insane facts right. It was about enduring them.--SB

He became a "caricature of himself."


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So...

While it is true that Balzac’s Paris is a multifarious monster—precursor to the textual Berlins and Dublins that came after—the difference between Balzac and his city-novel progeny is that the modernists were less concerned with a city’s “biological continuity” (its unity, progression, and connective tissue) and more interested in what could be called a city’s “biological discontinuity” (its intrinsic inability to adhere to a tidy narrative). This is what Döblin meant when he referred to “the chaos of cities.” In exploration of this biological discontinuity and in articulation of a certain urban texture, the modernists implemented new ways to embody the city’s multitude: the stream of consciousness, multiple perspectives, free indirect discourse, appropriation, fragmentation, and, especially, montage.--TM

I think I know Portland well enough to write a novel with the city as a central character.  Yet I get lost and can't find a narrative, truth or fiction, that suits me whenever I sit down to write about Portland and its other characters.

I should have quit Art long ago, but then what would I have done?  Nothing appealed to me as much as the dream of literature. I found nothing else worthy. Nothing that might move me along a reasonable path and into the heart of the mundane, where society thrives and coexists with "reality," where jobs and status and money and the ordinary prevail.

So, in Nightscape in Empire I wrote:


The Insane Lover's Question

How did it
come to this,
that I became
an insane lover
of the world's madness,
that the sight and sound of it
repelled me in my dreams as I
tossed through the night,
and never learned to
live a quiet life
before taking flight;
never quite getting
very much right?


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Prize Fight

In 1964, when Joseph Brodsky was 24, he was brought to trial for “social parasitism.” In the view of the state, the young poet was a freeloader. His employment history was spotty at best: he was out of work for six months after losing his first factory job, and then for another four months after returning from a geological expedition. (Being a writer didn’t count as a job, and certainly not if you’d hardly published anything.) In response to the charge, Brodsky leveled a straightforward defense: he’d been thinking about stuff, and writing. But there was a new order to build, and if you weren’t actively contributing to society you were screwing it up.--RW

For as long as I can remember my own creative life has been a skirmish between switching off and turning on, not in the Tim Leary sense, but in the sense that political thought will occasionally put you down for the count. By that I mean politics is out of the hands of the ordinary man, but art can give him succor, even save him.


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Survival Mode

I'll be watching.  I did my part as a community organizer, 1974-1976, fresh out of college, semi-idealistic.

The snow in New England was deep, the bullshit even deeper.

Yet, over 40-years later, I'm simpatico.  But I don't know what to do.

I'll live out my days, such as they are.  Any assault on seniors and Social Security in this country at this time ought to be greeted with a hail of bullets.

It might come to that, but not likely in my lifetime.


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Friday

Your weekend reading should include this batch of scintillating essays; big on style and content.

Seattle's playing better than usual this season.  See what happens in the dog days, though, when the Mariners usually pack it in, fold it up, and otherwise disembark from the cause.

Ichiro is moving into the front office, finally slowing down after a 17-year career with the Mariners, Yankees and Miami.  That was after playing 9 years in Japan.

Great player, surefire first ballot HOFer.


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Artist of the Day

I've read a couple of Vlautin's novels.  They're very good, highly recommended.


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Surreal Gossip

When Salvador Dalí came to lecture at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, he arrived with two Russian wolfhounds on leads. He wore a deep-sea diver’s suit and carried a billiard cue. A jewelled dagger hung from his belt. The subject of his lecture was ‘Paranoia, The Pre-Raphaelites, Harpo Marx and Phantoms’. The audience couldn’t hear him through the diving helmet, so it was not immediately obvious that Dalí was suffocating. When friends did eventually sound the alarm, they found the bolts on Dalí’s helmet stuck fast. Send for a spanner! By the time they’d taken the helmet off, Dalí was close to death.--LF

Sounds like a hoot. I went through a long gestation with the Surrealists.  What they did still interests me, though I haven't recently read or looked at their work.

I think the way they grovelled and clamored for recognition must have influenced many, many artists thereafter.  Warhol most notably.


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