Gingrich Redux

Do you think Round Bend Press doesn't have its finger on the pulse of the nation, or what?

Mere weeks after winning the coveted Idiot of the Week award presented on an occasionally weekly basis by RBP, Newt "The Salamander" Gingrich is following up his dumb-book tour with a little sideshow in Iowa, angling for a dumb run at a certain high office. The job of...wait...wait...you're not going to believe it...President of the United States of America!

It is our desire to keep you informed of the machinations of the malignant idiotocracy, the terrible, malingering, heartbreaking, cancerous spectre of idiocy, which is in full bloom now and sweeping across the nation, foiling good Common Sense, creating havoc and pooping all over the place like a sick kitty.

In that spirit, we proudly announce our Idiot for this week (drum roll, and what the heck, add a little tambourine and throw in a few bars of G harmonica for good measure).

Come on down, Newt. Pick up your second Idiot of the Week award!

Have you ever seen a worse painting in your life? I mean, can't the Republicans do one single thing right? How hard is it to find a competent artist to paint a bleeping picture?

I don't know whether I'm more disgusted by Newt or the artist, if that's what he calls himself. What a despicable display.

Good Lord! I can't stop looking at it...AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!

TS

Good Question, Sir!

The brilliant Les Leopold wonders why idiots are blaming the victim in our burgeoning unemployment picture.

Officially, there are five applicants for every job opening in the U.S. Keep in mind that the official stats are always low. Thousands upon thousands have been dumped off the unemployment rolls and are no longer counted in the stats because their unemployment benefits have expired. They are officially destitute and therefore insignificant.

The dumb asses on the Right seem to think all you need do is ask nicely for a job and you'll have one in a heartbeat. Talk about being out of touch. Employers these days are asking for a college degree and ten years of steady employment just to get a job pumping gas. A janitor must have a PhD., and a dishwasher must willingly sign a loyalty oath, pass three drug screening, kiss the restaurateur's rosy ass three times in the morning, and willfully submit to being sodomized by the head chef while being given fifty lashes with a wet noodle (it's a sick world).

The dumb asses on the Right believe that every unemployed person in the U.S. is a drug injecting reprobate with socialist tendencies.

The dumb asses on the Right can retire to their gated communities in the suburbs and wallow in their own excrement and tell us they don't stink of shit.

But we know differently, don't we? Well, don't we...

What a country, uh?

TS

The Real Mark Twain

In popular culture today, Twain is “Colonel Sanders without the chicken, the avuncular man who told stories,” Ron Powers, the author of “Mark Twain: A Life,” said in a phone interview. “He’s been scrubbed and sanitized, and his passion has been kind of forgotten in all these long decades. But here he is talking to us, without any filtering at all, and what comes through that we have lost is precisely this fierce, unceasing passion.”

The reviewer in this New York Times piece writes that the real Mark Twain has finally been exposed upon publication of the old curmudgeon's unexpurgated autobiography.

Twain dictated the book over the the last four years of his life and left orders to suppress publication for a century. Ninety-five percent of what is published here has never been seen by the public at large. It ought to create quite a backlash among contemporary jingoists and flag wavers.

This could become a great scandal. I can't wait to hear the Texas School Board's reaction. Sounds like a great read.


TS

Notes on Education

Two books are mandatory reading for educators coming up in the American system. One is Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and the other is Parker J. Palmer's The Courage to Teach.

Pondering Parker J. Palmer

Parker J. Palmer’s classic book, The Courage to Teach reminds me of Rollo May’s The Courage to Create. Their titles echo, but it is the wellspring of deep emotion both writers tap into while approaching their creation/teaching crafts that gives their voices resolve. I see their insights into creativity and teaching as inseparable phenomena linked by the necessities inherent in our peculiar humanness, and I believe that is the foundation of both writers’ visions. Here, briefly, is an interpretive reaction to Palmer:

With a great abstraction of emotion and a sense of awe, a functional spirituality/creativity grasps us at the onset of our lives. A baby forms deep and secure attachments to its mother within weeks of birth. It recognizes itself in a mirror by age two and begins to distinguish its otherness while setting out to explore the world of its senses—a highly creative endeavor. Early on, new stimuli create new sensations and overwhelming responses that come from the child’s prepackaged biological instincts.

Just as suddenly, the world intrudes on the child. If the child is fortunate, its mother and father immediately begin to expose it to elements of the world’s beauty—and guide it from darkness. They talk to the child with reason and love in their voices and share with it the great mystery of being, as they demonstrate the world’s goodness.

Then the child enters preschool under the care and diligence of secondary caregivers and teachers who value that child’s life as an individual. They will nourish it as a cause—for that is what a child represents, a cause that is greater than anything else on Earth.

Nothing else can touch the child’s importance—its innate creativity. For it is only through our recognition of the child’s sacredness that we can expect to witness advances in human culture.

A great segment of society, unfortunately, does not recognize the sacredness of the individual child, who must be taught to manage in the world. When parents do not recognize the sacredness of the child, and respond through their conditioned darkness to the child’s existence in harmful ways, we recognize the effects of poor parenting. Most often, poor parenting is linked to real poverty and stress.

Should we as a society be capable of recognizing the damage poor governance, through its conditioned darkness and impoverishment, inflicts on the sacred child? We should, but that is not where we are. Instead we allow our leadership to help design an impoverished culture by neglecting the sacred child.

Now, a great segment of society might argue that our leaders have done all they can to embrace the sacred child, given the limited dollars available to aid the poorly parented, and the stressed out government. If this argument is not rejected out-of-hand we are indeed doomed. If we do not elevate the sacred child to its rightful place in our culture—along with the sacred environment—there will soon be no point in continuing this cosmic exercise.

When poor governance damages culture, it is our responsibility in a democracy to repair the government. When poor governance promotes poor parenting by a systematic refusal to pay anything into culture, it is our responsibility to rethink the fiscal aspects of our present system.

In our present system of corporate socialism, those whom determine fiscal soundness pay lip-service to many groups and special interests. Rarely do they invest in those groups and interests, unless a payback in hard currency is foreseeable.

Corrupt reciprocal relationships exist between governments and business interests in most cultures. Dictatorships make an art of it, but crumbling democracies are just as at risk. It is not an accident that the wealth of our nation is funneling into fewer and fewer troughs. It is deliberate theft.

When it is too late to save the suicide victim, we often lament that we did not see the distress that led up to the act. We cannot afford to let our lamentations rule better sense when the sacred child is at risk.

TS

American Exiles

Much of what I think and write springs from an at times appallingly regional point of view. As much as I would prefer to think internationally, I am first and foremost a child of America’s Pacific Northwest; more specifically, I am an Oregonian. My stripe of nativity is wide and deeply engrained, and I spend an inordinate amount of time reflecting on the synergy of mobilization and sense of place.

Around me I have witnessed Oregon’s growth of transplants, seedlings, people who have arrived here to begin anew, lured by geography and escapist dreams. This is not a mystifying trend. The transplants speak openly of the allure, the advantages of the environment. The social anthropologists’ documentation of migration and hope is vast; I do not need to recover their sense of what lies “beyond” in the imaginations of exiles.

I’m in a unique situation now (for me) wherein I meet many transplants, more than at any time since I first gave thought to the meaning of place as social experience. A jobless black man newly arrived here from Detroit said to me recently, “Of course I knew the economy is bad here. But I also knew it could not be as bad as Detroit. I had nothing to lose coming here.”

The argument is both a hopeful view and a curse generated by the ruling class in a new paradigm of intensified greed and increasingly harsh social distortion. It always amazes me to realize that everyone is here for a blink of time, yet we are infinitely capable of turning our little time-allotment into a life or death pursuit of wealth. That is not what we need from our every endeavor--other sources and goals should move to the fore. They must if we are to survive as a species, isn't it plain enough?

The trend to job loss in the U.S. exasperates the loss of place in the psyches of people; for its part, the Pacific Northwest provides a salve for some very open wounds created by the high-tech economy and neoliberal, global economization. Powerless to defeat moneyed interests, ordinary people caught in the contraction of the U.S. economy must renew their sense of comfort by reinvention. Often, and seemingly progressively, that entails reconfiguring place as destiny. If I am to suffer the indignity of poverty, the transplant can argue, I shall at least suffer elsewhere, for I have lost the faith I once held for my home.

My sense of this began naturally enough when I moved to Maine in 1974. I was an adventurist, like many of the young people I have met over the years who have settled here in Oregon. Maine, too, has as draws landscape and figments of possibility, and environment as refuge. I determined long ago that it was either there or here, that I would live and die in one or the other. I chose Oregon because of its power to transform my imagination within my rootedness, but I could have just as easily remained in Maine, in exile, or returned there, because I had reinvented or perhaps “found” my character there. Though I have not visited in many years, Maine yet draws me into its web of place and possibility. Who knows, perhaps I shall live there in the end, fall into a snow bank and take my last frozen breath. That is a popular and necessary way of dying there.

Of my sixty-years, I have lived all but six in my homeland. As much as any region in the U.S., the Pacific Northwest is marked by its provincialism, a quality that the American expatriate author Paul Bowles labeled, in a different context, “the sheltering sky.” In his novel The Sheltering Sky, Bowles draws a conflicted married couple into the intrigue and unsettling discomfort of North Africa, where Bowles had noted certain varieties of American expats unlike him were unable to foil their conundrum of exile and longing.

The Pacific Northwest has in its own manner become a "sheltering sky" for a new breed of exiles within an America that is barely recognizable from the country I knew forty years ago.

Darling you got to let me know
Should I stay or should I go
If you say that you are mine
I'll be here 'til the end of time
So you got to let me know
Should I stay or should I go

It's always tease, tease, tease
You're happy when I'm on my knees
One day is fine, the next is black
So if you want me off your back
Well come on and let me know
Should I Stay or should I go

Should I stay or should I go now
Should I stay or should I go now
If I go there will be trouble
An' if I stay it will be double
So come on and let me know…

The Clash

Tennessee Williams on Paul Bowles and the 1949 publication of The Sheltering Sky.


TS

Memory and the Muse

I crashed hard today catching up on my sleep. Remembering feels like rigorous physical exercise, too rough for my dispirited core-self, draining. I do not have a solid enough grasp of anything I write here to consider myself an authority, so I enslave myself to the spirit of reverie. Ideas ebb and flow in my consciousness, and then it is as if I have no mind at all, as if I am floating through the experience, not actively living it. To describe this feels like the most difficult task I've ever confronted. Words crumble as I type. Who am I amidst this fragmentation? I can't write a sentence now. I lack cohesion. This may be an aspect of my particular order of depression. I have a drug. I took it this morning as usual, yet I feel broken.


What is remembering? It feels like an abstraction, at times unreal. One is disturbed by the gaps inherent in one's own history. Days, weeks, months obliterated. I kept a journal for a time when I was a young man working as an organizer. It fell apart as I realized I could not make it make sense. I never tried journal writing again. But, since starting this blog in April, I've seldom missed posting something every day, even if it was not up to the standards I'd prefer to regularly exhibit. But what are those? I've tried to find its essence, the meaning of my past. Today felt out of sync all day and I felt drained, so I slept.



When a man grows old


When a man grows old and his energy ebbs he turns to writing poetry

When a man grows old women look beautiful, but what can he do about it

When a man grows old he resents the machinations of politicians and kids

When a man grows old and his teeth turn yellow he scorns his friends

When a man grows old his poetry leaves him empty until he drinks a beer

When a man grows old night becomes stranger than the days of his past

When a man grows old time flows backward to a sense of what lasts



History is a miserable joke


History is a miserable joke told by a man with a monocle and an impaired ear who believes history

But even the autodidact knows history doesn’t happen--it is invented to make you feel as miserable as possible

Remember this the next time you shop in produce for lettuce that is fresh and free of dogma

You’ll be elated to find something good to eat

You’ll be saddened by the assassination of broccoli




If your muse is dead


If your muse is dead you must quit believing in her

Try drinking in the morning and shattering your illusions

Eat a steak, breathe in

Take a break from the deadly intoxication of words--roam at will

Stand in a clear field, listen to the maniacal bird that saved your life

Try dreaming

It is best left unsaid-- leave everything to the imagination

But hold on!

Another muse will come along and make you feel like a fool when she grins

Poetry can be such a drag



In the helpless morning


In the helpless morning when your liver assures you of your poetic cause

And you know greatness by its first name

And you fumble for a bite to eat while standing stooped at the kitchen sink

Readying to fall into a trap like Hem and Hunter

And you don’t have a weapon

You’d better put on some Mississippi blues

And pray

Even if you don’t believe in Jesus

Even if you are as naked as an old man turning to poetry



When after a few drinks


When after a few drinks poetry becomes an obsession, the story is about to end

When the dawn holds promise, the day unravels like a sure narrative biography

“This happened, but the other is a lie”

When the poet gets down to business he sees all of this in a glowing seed

When he is mesmerized by the details of his blood

When the neighborhood shimmers in a blazing light

When friends pass on

End of the story



to a painter


your silence is conspicuous

de kooning has crashed down on your head

turner has set your hair on fire

color has consumed you in flames

you are better off now

you are finally free


TS

The Beat Goes On

And the beat goes on:

"The nation's jobs crisis is so catastrophic that, unless Congress acts on the scale of the New Deal, millions of Americans will experience extremely long periods of unemployment for many years ahead," Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, told a panel of the Committee on Ways and Means recently."

Read the rest of this strong essay by Adrianne Appel at CommonDreams.

The big boy Republicans are on vacation, collecting their outrageous salaries, visiting their top-flight medical caregivers, primping in the mirror, paying their mistresses to keep quiet, striking deals with rich friends, sailing their yachts, and so much more.

Will it ever change?

And Alexander Cockburn.

Poems of Humor and Protest

One of the City Lights Pocket Poets Series titles Bob Thomas sent to me when I lived in Maine in the mid-seventies was Kenneth Patchen's Poems of Humor and Protest, which Lawrence Ferlinghetti published in 1956. Patchen's book was the third in the City Lights venture, and still remains among my favorites. Patchen was a fantastic poet.

Patchen had a rough life, beginning with the loss of his sister when he was a teenager. Her death cast a pall over his life that he never completely transcended. Then, while still in his twenties, he was hurt when a friend's car fell on him as he worked on it. The accident damaged his spinal cord and Patchen suffered through a series of experimental surgeries, culminating in a final botched surgery that immobilized him. His wife, Miriam, took care of him and Patchen and her had a rare, completely dedicated relationship that produced a number of very fine love poems by the writer.

Patchen's success was marginal, partially because he was a committed pacifist during World War II, and he acquiesced to no one (and of course poets are marginalized in general in the U.S). If ever a writer was committed to the ideal of peace it was Patchen, whose job as he formulated it was to delineate the world's suffering and pathos to a sleeping public.

His protest drew the attention of many notable writers on both coasts of the U.S. Henry Miller wrote a laudatory essay about his life and work, and the Beats gathered at his feet. With Kenneth Rexroth and a few others, he founded the jazz poetry movement of the forties, an idea Jack Kerouac ran with in 1959's Mexico City Blues, 242 improvised "choruses" that Kerouac affiliated with Charlie Parker and bebop. For his part, Patchen read with Charlie Mingus as early as 1955. Unfortunately, their gigs were never recorded.

A decade prior to working with Mingus, Patchen recorded with John Cage for a radio program, work I've never heard, but can easily imagine is stunning if you understand Cage's work, an acquired taste like most experimental music.

(In Portland in the late seventies Dan Lissy, a well-known writer and musician, had committed to memory the entirety of Kerouac's book, a mammoth accomplishment. When Lissy recited the work you could hear Parker, I am convinced).

At mid-career, Patchen tried his hand with free-associative novel writing and penned The Journal of Albion Moonlight, a deep meditation on delirium and madness that is confounding in the manner of the "new novel," fragmented as open stasis and uninvolved with typical time-evolved narrative. It has a dadaist or surreal quality, comparisons of which Patchen, always obstinate, disputed. The book was brought out by James Laughlin's New Directions, another of that publisher's great coups, in 1961.

Patchen wrote one other long prose work, in 1945, titled Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, which amounts to a long inside joke about novel writing. The book's protagonist must suffer all the indignity that a poor would-be author suffers in his quest to be heard. His shyness about the world's reaction to his work has him spelling hell: h--l, so as to not offend the good taste of the masses. Etc.

Patchen died in 1972 at age 61.

The Temple

To leave the earth was my wish, and no will stayed my rising.
Early, before sun had filled the roads with carts
Conveying folk to weddings and to murders;
Before men left their selves of sleep, to wander
In the dark of the world like whipped beasts.

I took no pack. I had no horse, no staff, no gun.
I got up a little way and something called me,
Saying,
'Put your hand in mine. We will seek God together.'
And I answered, 'It is your father who is lost, not mine.'
Then the sky filled with tears of blood, and snakes sang.

Kenneth Patchen


TS

Real World Jobs

I have written here about my childhood work in the berry and bean fields of the Willamette Valley. But the fields were not my lone source of spending money every year. The harvest season lasted from June to the beginning of the next school year in early September, which left me seven months of free time to find other jobs to contribute to the scarce income my mother and I received from Social Security, benefits paid to us in the name of my deceased father. One should not wonder why my mother then was an old- school Democrat and Progressive Era sympathizer.

The New Deal saved America, despite what we hear these days from backward thinking Republicans and other reactionaries who would love to see the clock turned back on progressivism in general and the New Deal in particular. Without Social Security my mother and I would have been homeless and likely died. That is not an exaggeration.

The Bush administration's scheme to privatize Social Security in 2005 met a well-justified and quick death. If you need a barometer of how far out of touch Dubya was, think about that. Of the many asinine ideas he dreamed up, that one was perhaps the most asinine of all. I had to applaud the American people at the time. They effectively stuffed a sock in Dubya's mouth for once and spoke in his stead.

I had a paper route when I was a kid, but not the conventional kind. I sold Grit door to door, earning ten cents per fifty-cent sale. The newspaper/magazine was published weekly and my stack was delivered to my house on Saturday mornings. Weekends, I would hit the neighborhood hard selling in a long and wide sweep of the area around Langmack Airport, where many middle-class families lived. By scouring the area with my papers in a heavy-canvass tote with Grit lettered on it in bright, bold red, I managed to build a regular clientele. I became adept at picking the right house to approach for a sale. I looked at the front lawn first. If it was green, well-kept, manicured to perfection, clean and fresh, I'd approach the house and ring the doorbell. Generally, the woman of the house would answer the door and look at me like I was the cutest thing in the world, which I may have been.

"Grit, ma'am?" I'd say.
"Of course," she'd say, and I'd pull a Grit out of the bag, pass it to her, open my palm, and take the money. At times it was ridiculously easy, but at other times I guessed wrong. I had my share of contemptuous assholes to deal with, like we all do.

I made decent cash every weekend, enough to buy a steady diet of junk food and the magazines I favored, including hunting and fishing publications, hot rod magazines, Mad, and an assortment of teen music magazines that I would read to learn the lyrics of popular songs, especially the ones I heard on the radio by the Rolling Stones, whom I could never quite decipher without the text in front of me as I listened. Many people loathed the Stones because Mick mumbled when singing. I just looked the songs up to figure out what he was saying and then tried to sing along. I must say I was often surprised by what I read and how it juxtaposed with my first impressions of the lyrics.

Such is art.

I submitted my own lyrics to the magazines--they were always having "contests." Inevitably a letter would come saying I had real songwriting talent and that for a mere $50 I could have my lyrics published and presented to the stars and possibly have them sung on a record. My mother nixed the idea, of course, which didn't bother me at all because I knew a scam when I heard one. I think I took pleasure in resubmitting one song after another, always receiving a variation of the same lame return letter extolling my talent. It became something of a game I played, just to see how they would express my greatness each time.

When I wasn't selling newspapers door-to-door I worked in a restaurant for a family with a nearby eatery. Patrick's Cafe sat on the side of the road on Highway 20, just west of Thompson Lane. I don't recall whether laws prohibited kids from working like I did in that restaurant in the late fifties and early sixties. Perhaps they did, but I managed to get around them, and I became the official weekend potato peeler. That was my one and only job. I stood at a sink counter on a little riser and peeled a hundred pounds of potatoes, a morning's worth, and dropped them into a pot of water to be cleaned and diced by someone else before they were passed to the grill and precooked, or blanched, for morning prep.

I used to laugh when some hotshot kitchen manager would ask me if I ever worked in a kitchen as I filled out my application. I had the standard old-timer's line in waiting. Kid, I thought, I've forgotten more about kitchen work than you've ever known. The kid asked a harmless question and it's a harmless thought-reaction, but explaining oneself gets old every time.

I still have a difficult time with all the would-be Bobby Flays in Portland who think they're the shit. I could cook circles around most of those assholes if I wanted to, which I don't because I despise restaurateurs, having met few capable of telling me anything I don't already know. Anything I didn't know by age-ten.

The exploding food cult in Portland also sickens me like a food-borne disease. Nothing about food should make one as rapturous as some of these "foodies" claim to be after eating at the current great restaurant in town. Food is a charade now, a status symbol, like a car. Why not just eat and shut the fuck up about it, okay people? People are starving all around you. Respect that I don't care about your $50 plate.

Most phonies like this couldn't tell a Fly Agaric from a Morel if their lives depended on it, which they might. The Fly Agaric is poisonous.




TS

Neo Liberalism and the Economic Rules of Engagement

Forgotten Casualties of the Recession

By ANTHONY DiMAGGIO

"Consistently ignored in reporting on the economic crisis is the dramatic toll it’s taking on America’s children. The prevalence of poverty has expanded dramatically in light of growing unemployment, accompanied by state attacks on social welfare spending that benefits the disadvantaged. Child poverty grew nationally to a total of 22 percent of all children in 2010, an all time high for the last two decades, and an increase in five percent over the last four years. Half of the poor are now classified as in “extreme poverty” – described as living in families earning below 50percent of the poverty line. The percent of children who are food insecure also increased to 18 percent in 2010. This growth translates into an additional 750,000 children nationwide who are malnourished."

Read the rest of DiMaggio's fine article here.

Nothing less than a war on the poor is at hand. Where is the outrage?



TS

To Have and to Forget

Dean Baker over at CommonDreams makes a solid point when he says Republicans can wait out the gloomy economic realities of the present and expect voters to blame the poor economy on the Demos come mid-term elections in November. In fact, the GOP is playing its obstructionists' cards with temerity, cynically banking on America's forgetfulness. They simply expect Americans will forget the recent filibuster of the new stimulus package enlightened economists are calling for. Are Americans that forgetful and easily manipulated? They probably are. We'll know in November, I guess. Here is Baker's article.

TS

Open Cinema

The Critics' Picks in the New York Times today is Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, a film I have not seen but would very much like to. Maybe I'll rent it later. This 1995 take on the American old west appears to attempt a more authentic portrayal of the times than the typical Hollywood movie about America's nineteenth century.

I'm curious as to how I missed this one. I usually pay attention to Jarmusch, a great filmmaker and disciple of independent cinema. Like John Sayles, he's famous for grabbing hold of his projects and locking them down within the parameters of his own vision, not some money manager's formulaic checklist of movie making principles, which is the habit of Hollywood.

Jarmusch and Sayles have mainly kept the faith in an era where it seems to be more and more difficult to complete a project on your own terms in the movie biz. The brilliant Coen brothers have managed to cross the aesthetic divide between Hollywood and independence, but they are not normative. They're simply overwhelmingly talented and original.

Jarmusch and Sayles always had the same organic wisdom. It's hard to tell why the Coens managed to play the game with more lucrative results, not that they reap the harvest like James Cameron, whose movies bore the piss out of me. They're just solid, tell funny and unique stories, edit with astonishing flair, and write great scripts that they let actors play with within the movie by keeping their minds open to on-set magic.

Jarmusch and Sayles do it as well as the Coens, but it appears personalities and business acumen and much else is the difference. Mmmmmm.

The premise and desire for authenticity in Dead Man reminds me of one of my favorite movies of the seventies, America's fertile and much missed glory days of film production. That is Michael J. Pollard's portrayal of Billy the Kid, in Dirty Little Billy. Take your rain gear and galoshes if you ever go to see this movie. It actually rains throughout the movie and things get plenty muddy, and Billy the Kid is a psychopath, just as he was in real life.

P.S., I just noticed the links don't work here, and I'm not rewriting them. The Times wants your subscription, evidently. Sorry about that!



TS

Safeway's Tyranny

It can be ascertained that Safeway's facile, overly friendly customer service campaign is bogus. Not that we didn't know from the get go that nobody, and I mean not even Joe Friendly of Friendly Township USA, is that friendly all the time.

I have for over a month now been blogging at the Safeway cafe inside the Jefferson St. store in Portland. I buy coffee, donuts and lunch and sometimes dinner there to support my peaceful will to co-existence, and I have never been asked to leave or to move along. Last month I spent $200 in the store.

Today I went to work there and the power in the cafe was out. Unsubstantiated rumors spoken by some of the regulars have it that the store is trying to weed out the assorted homeless and hangers-on at the cafe. The powers that be have altogether lost their friendliness in other words. They've blown it out of the sky with a missile of contempt for the down and out. While they obviously have the right to run the store in any manner they like, I have the right to say fuck you. So much for their happiness campaign.

This is where things go sideways as I relate what happened next. I can tell you without reservation that the friendly campaign ended suddenly, having run smack into a not-so-friendly swell of reality.

Assuming management may be unaware of the power situation, I told a worker in "customer service" about it. She was pleasant enough, though not terribly friendly in the usual manner, and called the manager's office.

Great I thought, someone will check the circuits for that section of the store and Round Bend Press will be back in business. Waiting, I ran my battery down as I researched various topics for this exceptional blog, trying to keep my patience, before trying another angle. I approached a young man in an orange vest. The vest is Safeway's universal sign of friendliness.

I give you verbatim the ensuing conversation, because it was pointless and an absolute sign that the charade is over at Safeway

I said, "Young man, do you know the power is out in the cafe?"

"The power doesn't work, sir," he said with a terseness that surprised me, given the friendly nature of the Jefferson St. store, but which did not surprise me knowing the friendly campaign is completely false.

"Yes, I know that. Do you know if it will be repaired soon? I mean, is anyone working on the situation?"

"The power doesn't work, sir." The kid pursed his lips like a pouting adolescent listening to a father's admonishments.

"I think I understand that."

"The power doesn't work, sir." Any semblance of friendliness had become extinct.

"Well, perhaps someone ought to check the breakers."

"The power doesn't work, sir."

I walked away. I have other places to go. When I left the homeless and computer users were grumbling, in a state of common dissonance, scheming revenge.

They should try blogging, like me.

The "sirs" in the kid's conversation were as empty as his head. The unsubstantiated rumors are likely true. The kid was scripted by his overseers. He was living in fear of saying something meaningful, of stepping outside the corporate circle, or thinking for himself.

More corporate tyranny to help me through the day. Thank you, Safeway. Happy 4th of July! You are certainly celebrating the spirit of America. You are a wonderful example of my basic theme. You are corporate buttheads.

TS

The Bullshit Deepens

A Republican with enough balls and rare good sense to see the truth speaks his mind, and is of course is pilloried. Can the Afghanistan War create any more of an absurd scenario than this?

Michael Steele should resign because he is obviously out of step with the GOP's primary goal, which is to feed the military industrial complex the last ounce of flesh off the bones of the American people.

Congress and Obama are locked in a maze of menace and cruelty and can't find their way out of the fantasy they have created. Obama is a huge disappointment, and an absolutely dreadful tactician. He has managed to dismantle in a mere year and a half the hope he so eloquently describes when he isn't playing the fool to Congress' Machiavellian conspiracy.

What a fucking sad state of affairs.

If Steele doesn't resign in light of all this bullshit, I will. We need Pat Paulsen more now than ever.

TS

Marx, God & Hyperbole

The following happens to be the most subversive short essay of the 21st century, and by a miraculous coincidence is included in my collection of essays, Alt-Everything, published last year by Round Bend Press.

Simply amazing, isn't it?

The Essential Spirituality of The Communist Manifesto


The spiritual fervor of Marx and Engels is not often acknowledged in discussions of their 1848 Communist Manifesto, except in pejorative terms, as in—“they are religiously communistic.” Their spirituality has for decades been denied by corporate apologists, autocrats and tyrants, such as Lenin and Stalin, whose well-meaning but ultimately futile attempts to design a workers’ state centered on Marx’s and Engels’ ideals of a lasting proletarian revolution.

The authors were betrayed by ethnic and religious dysfunctions that swept through Europe at the turn of the nineteenth-century, and the document was most exclusively scrutinized as a political and economic tract, with limited consideration of its moral imperative and its roots in spiritual pragmatism.

Spiritual fervor? A paradox lies at the heart of the Manifesto’s earth-rattling economic philosophy. As a spiritual document of the first rank, it transcended the tenets of religious dogma in its quest to provide answers to the social ills of the nineteenth century. Among those who seriously wielded power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the polemic presented a grave threat because its spirituality evolved from Utopian decency. Decency, above all, is a spiritual quest, whether it is gleaned from religion or from a purely rhetorical rejection of religion—in favor of decency.

How strange and frightening it must have been for European elites to be slapped in the face with the truth of conviction, to be assaulted with such clarity and reason regarding the historical record of dispossession: “Almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank,” wrote Marx. Not even the biblical tale of Jesus attacking the moneychangers could have caused as much panic among…well, moneychangers.

Being a spiritual tract, the Manifesto exposed the hypocrisy of a bourgeois discernment of class structure within not just a papacy watching its political influence erode, but within Protestantism, as the outrageous and odious in England’s factories and Parliament were continuously exposed as conspiracies between the political gentry and proponents of the Industrial Revolution.

The Manifesto prophesied Bismarck’s leadership in the “Scramble for Africa,” and, later, the English and French “to-the-victor-go-the-spoils” division of the Middle East at the end of World War I. Those capitalist inspired transgressions were exemplary of imperial hubris and, despite the religious dialectic of war’s meaning, were certainly not spiritual.

As it became increasingly clear that within the structure of a growing nationalism nation-states and religion could not completely co-exist, the Manifesto provided relief from absurd notions that associated poverty and suffering with a divine creator, whose grand plan made misery expected, accepted and palatable among the elite strata of Europeans. The brewing social disasters of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century were caused by an ever widening chasm between church and state. Leaders had utterly failed to merge and nurture spirituality inside burgeoning capitalism. This failure is obliquely addressed in the Manifesto. “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.”

Marx and Engels saw the attacks by religious institutions coming and addressed the matter in their document. Arguing that religious institutions and their supporters would accuse communism of calling for the abolition of religion, they declared the point moot. “What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonism, antagonism that assumed different forms at different epochs.” The statement infers realism, that something as fundamental as spirituality cannot be abolished. Spirituality, even religion, might be transformed, yes. It might even be improved. But abolition was out of the equation.

In providing a basic analysis of The Communist Manifesto, cynical capitalists attacked. Cynical distortions arose soon after the document’s publication and in ongoing analyses of its fundamental message. The Manifesto attacks religion for its hypocrisy, but it was never the intent of Marx and Engels to propose that business moguls might be willfully stripped of their spirituality along with their obscene economic power over others. To imply that as its message was merely the rank obfuscation of the threatened. To point to tyrants who later denied religious freedom in the name of communism is to deny the essential truth of the Manifesto.

The document was a spiritual call for decency—an affirmation of the best of the human condition. Only later did it become a plaything for corrupt politicians, dictators, and religious fanatics.


This essay first appeared in 2008 in The Oregon Literary Review, edited by Charles Deemer.


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