The Great Wall

WARNING!  Mrs. N. is even more cheesed off than usual today, so, you may want to take that into consideration before you proceed.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful spring day here in Dixie and I feel physically superb.  My other half, who underwent a somewhat perilous surgical adventure a matter of days ago, …

… reports feeling just peachy.  For that I am grateful.  I’m not grateful to anyone, or, any thing in particular because I’m not religiously afflicted.  I figure it’s all pretty much chance, random events and happenstance in this lovely meat grinder, this one way ride through the Land of the Absurd.  No, I’m just feeling grateful in a generic sense.  In a sense that it’s spring and nobody has a brain tumor, or, a hideous skin rash and boils today… at least in my house.  But it doesn’t stop me from bitching.  I still have my work.  There is still all the crap that goes on around me, that nonsense that other people are up to… the stuff that does the one thing that irritates the shit out of me more than anything else.  That stupid crap that makes me embarrassed to be of my species…. and, in the spring when everything is looking alive and “shiny new greeny”… it just stands out, like something caught in my eye.  You know?

Here is this years picture.  I took it today.  It’s what Mrs. N. has to look at, on the way in, to shop at Wal-Mart.  Wal-Mart is a company owned by the richest family in America.  America is widely considered to be the richest country in the world.   Wal-Mart has more employees than some countries have citizens.  They pay their employees squat.  Peanuts!  I’m sure the family that owns Wall-Mart views all their employees as so many peasants, the way kings were accustomed to viewing people who were ridiculously poor and unfortunate compared to them.  I don’t really see how they can help it.  Human beings are stinkers that way and have been throughout recorded history.  It’s so embarrassing.

These Wal-Mart creeps pay their peasants so little that their spouses and children, who are peasants too, qualify for government provided health care.  Some deal.  The Wall-Mart Family makes a killing and sticks the taxpayers with the health care bill.  You know why?  Because they believe in Capitalism.  They hate Socialism.  The fuckers must laugh themselves to sleep every night of the week.

But, I digress…  Look at that picture above.  Every time I see that wall… that testament to half-assery… that red-neck salute to the meaning of “American Workmanship”… I get pissed off.  The GOD DAMNED Chinese can build a wall that lasts 2000 years…  And, looks like this today!

and THIS is the shit we build.

It’s a fucking miracle I can drag my ass out of bed in the morning when I have to put up with this kind of shit.  Who the hell in their right mind puts their name on a piece of shit, bit of construction, like this?  Who “signed off” on this disaster?  I have asked The Building Inspector.  I have enquired politely of the County Director of Safety and, oddly enough, they are hesitant to discuss the matter.  It appears Mrs. N. will be forced to resort to one of her specialties.  She doesn’t want to.  She is beginning to feel that it is being thrust upon her, so to speak.  Mrs. N. will have no choice but to become exceedingly rude, belligerent and obnoxious.  Sarcasm will be employed liberally.  Mrs. N. will make enemies.

There was a time when Mrs. N. used to care about things like that.  Making enemies that is.  That time is long past.  Now all Mrs. N. cares about is stopping the embarrassment, even if it is just a little.  Saying FUCK NO when that is the only thing it makes sense to say.  Not being shy about it.

I read in the paper that the new plan is to hire armed guards for all the schools in the county.  It should cost about $1,000,000 a year to do this.  As long as nobody tells the crazy people with guns that they can kill children in “other places”, just as easily, I’m sure that the increase in property taxes to pay for the guards will be more than worth it.  I’m just thankful I live in Tea-Party Republican Country.  Here we know that Government is the problem, not the solution.  Here most of us are positive that evolution is a stinking lie, and that Obama is a Muslim just itching to take away all our guns.

Mrs. N. worries about the road ahead.  Things seem to be shaker than they have ever been before.   If I didn’t know better I would think my teeth were moving around in my head at night.  In the morning, sometimes, they are in places I just don’t ever remember seeing them before.

Maybe I just need a vacation.  Perhaps someplace on the water……

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

 

Droning-on…

droning  present participle of drone (Verb)

Verb Make a continuous low humming sound. Speak tediously in a dull monotonous tone: “while Jim droned on”.

Merriam-Webster adds this.

1.   a stingless male bee (as of the honeybee) that has the role of mating with the queen and does not gather nectar or pollen.

 2.  one that lives on the labors of others : parasite

3.  an unmanned aircraft or ship guided by remote control.

That ties it together… there’s the connection.  You see, I read this in the New York TIMES this morning and it got me thinking about where this all goes.  Well,… read this, and we’ll talk.

This month the Obama administration came under attack for the use of drones and the excessive casualties they inflict on civilians. Taking the criticism seriously, the administration has announced the development of a new array of “smart drones” that pinpoint strikes with brutal accuracy. 

Mrs. N can’t help her poor head from throbbing and expanding & contracting in a most unpleasant and frightening manner when she reads something like this before she has had her tea and has watered all her orchids on a sunny sunday morning.    (That’s the kind of sentence you can read, tediously, in a dull monotonous tone, and save your proper punctuation for another time.)  You would be droning.  There is another kind of droning.  It’s the kind “our” administration is working on so that they can pin-point blow your ass up.  Who ever you are, and where ever you are.  BOOM!  …You are dead!   (drones look like this)

It’s squeaking on the inside of Mrs. N’s head now, as if pressure was building, and it was beginning to leak someplace where it isn’t screwed down tight.  Mrs N. tried to concentrate on something pleasant, and looked out the window hoping the noise would pass.

Once the hissing stopped and the teeth were no longer moving around in my mouth it occurred to me that this changes everything.  It’s Science Fiction time!  Armies and Navies and most of the Air Forces in existence are obsolete.  Going to war is ridiculously “elective”… from now on.

Making the decision to look into the future isn’t an easy thing for Mrs. N. to do.  Oh, she CAN LOOK all right, but, it always leaves  her feeling disjointed in time for days on end after.  One little sniff of the blossom of The All-Seeing Orchid that grew out of a bit of crumbled timber, left over from the old garage.. and… away we go.  I saved the handful of rotted wood.  I took it before the clean-up crew from The Department of Energy scooped everything from the garage up, and shipped it to the Savanna Nuclear Disposal Site.  I crumbled it up and used it as a medium in an orchid pot.  I intended to plant it with a cutting, but, never did.  The All-Seeing Orchid grew out of it unannounced.  I leaned in and took a deep sniff……..

In the blink of an eye … It was the future and I was appropriately dressed in the same outfit that David Bowie wore as Ziggy Stardust.

In the future I witnessed nobody ever said anything about another country or a large corporation that wasn’t complimentary anymore.  If you pissed someone with access to capital off they blew your ass up with a drone.  It changed things dramatically.  It changed the meaning of Capitalism.  Capitalists were called “Button Men”, but, more about that later.

Nobody wanted to be a Dictator any more.  Nobody wanted to be President of anything of consequence.  The most dangerous thing a person could do was to become famous and easily recognized.  Minding your own business became a well respected virtue again. Because military spending was but a fraction of what it was in the “pre-drone” days there was lots of tax money left over to spend on elective health care and the arts.  Everybody you knew had face lifts, liposuction and magnificent artificial breasts.   Gardening and interpretive dance flourished.  There were no more State of the Union speeches.  Everybody knew what state we were in.  Presidents and Congress people were selected by lottery.  They served their time, or, they went to jail.  It was the only way to fill Washington DC with warm bodies.  Government was reduced to an absolute minimum.

All the members of government met once a week and decided who should get blown up.  Then they blew them up with drones.  No more war.  They just blew up all the people who were making trouble.  It didn’t take long for all the trouble makers to be blown up.  Then, hardly anybody made any trouble any more.  They don’t call politicians Senators, or Congressmen in the future.  They just call them Button Men.  If you were the leader of a country that was making trouble, or, just some stupid greedy person who annoyed enough people enough…  the Button Men just pressed the button and you got wacked.  BOOM!  A missile falls from the sky at a zillion miles an hour and blows your ass up.  THE END.

Kids in school had a hard time imagining what it was like before the Button Men ran the government.  When they learned that America almost went belly up because the stupid plutocratic son of a greedy plutocratic past President started a war on borrowed money they couldn’t believe it.  They could never be made to grasp the concept of killing millions of people when all you really wanted, or, needed to do was kill the stinker making the trouble.

Teenagers wore T-shirts with pictures of Saddam Hussein on them like they used to wear ones with pictures of Che Guevara and Pink Floyd.  Saddam went down in history, with Hitler & Osama bin Laden, as the 3 most expensive people in history to kill.  Kids couldn’t believe it when they learned how much money was spent.  They were convinced that their parents generation were the stupidest bastards that ever lived.  They never got tired of asking old people to….  Just THINK of what you could have done with that MONEY!

In the future they had taken [In God We Trust] off all the money and National Monuments and replaced it with the same phrase they stenciled on the sides of all the drone missiles.

..”The principal and, indeed, the ONLY thing that is wrong with the world is man.”..  [Jung]

The only thing that wasn’t changed at all in the future was kids thinking their parents generation were stupid bastards.

And, that their parents music really sucked.

Human Sacrifice [And other things that make you scratch your head]

…”People were crowded five deep at the tiny counter of a gun shop near Atlanta, where a pastor from Knoxville, Tenn., was among the customers who showed up in person after the store’s Web site halted sales because of low inventory. Emptying gun cases and bare shelves gave a picked-over feel to gun stores in many states. High-capacity magazines, which some state and federal officials want to ban or restrict, were selling briskly across the country: one Iowa dealer said that 30-round magazines were fetching five times what they sold for just weeks ago.”  [Front page New York Times 1/12/13]

“Gun dealers and buyers alike said that the rapid growth in gun sales — which began climbing significantly after President Obama’s re-election and soared after the Dec. 14 shooting at a school in Newtown, Conn., prompted him to call for new gun laws — shows little sign of abating.”

1. Obama was elected again.  He is a Black man, so, quite naturally, white people think he is going to take away their guns.

2. Five and six year old children were turned into Swiss Cheese by a mentally ill kid whose mother feared the government, owned lots of guns, and taught him how to shoot.

[These] are the two primary reasons we are given for the Bonanza in gun sales.  The first one involves President Obama.  But, Obama didn’t try to take guns away from white people last time he was elected president.  To the contrary, he signed laws into being permitting hand guns to be carried in places they were never permitted before.   Yet, when he was elected for a second term, BINGO, gun sales went through the roof again.  He is the first black person to be elected President.  He is the only person elected President whose election caused gun sales to skyrocket.  There is, of course, NO connection.

The second reason, or occurrence, that prompted gun sales to go ballistic is the massacre of helpless little children in Newtown, Connecticut.   It was the latest in a long and horrible list of occasions where a crazy person armed themselves and killed as many people as they could.

As shocking as what I am about to tell you is, I assure you that it is true.

The American people divided themselves into two diametrically opposed camps on the issue of gun control.  (It’s true!)

I am not a gun owner myself.  I do not understand people who think the answer to Americas epidemic of gun deaths is more guns.  I would very much like to understand this.  People who think more guns are the answer don’t understand me.  I see this as yet one more curious example of American culture unraveling.

Don’t ask me why, but, all this killing and death got me thinking about human sacrifice.  It got me thinking about how the Romans so enjoyed watching other people killed in horrible ways…. How so many, many cultures practiced human sacrifice… How so many religions are rooted in it!

I wondered… If the Roman games, complete with children being ripped apart and eaten by wild animals, were presented today…. How many Americans would go?  How different are we than they were, psychologically?  Assuming that they loved their children every bit as much as we love ours… what, do you suppose, they “got out” of watching the bloody spectacles in the arena? Why were they so popular?  Why were ANY human sacrifices throughout history popular spectator events?  What was/is it about witnessing the death of others that so fascinates… so moves… so deeply motivates and effects people to this day and in so many different ways?

What does the sacrifice of others do for me?

They are dead and I’m not and in that there is power.  In that is the temporary end of fear because, for the moment, another has lost and I have won.  For the moment I can rest and breathe easy.  For the moment I can feel stronger.  The fear in the herd abates because the lion has chosen his victim and made the kill.  The traffic backs up for miles along the highway as cars creep past the overturned, smoking wreck.

..”The longer people looked at the death of someone else, the more pleasure they could have in sensing the security and the good fortune of their own survival.”  [Elias Canetti “Crowds and Power”]

…”The continual grinding sacrifice of animal and human life in the arenas (on TV) was all of a piece with the repressions of a society that was dedicated to war and that lived in the teeth of death.  It was the perfect pastime to work off the anxieties and show the ultimate personal control of death.  The more death you saw unfold before your eyes, the more you thrust your thumbs downward, the more you bought off your own life.”.. [Ernest Becker “Escape From Evil]

Then, of course, there is the hunting enthusiast who doesn’t need the meat, but, so deeply enjoys the hunt and the kill.

Gregory Zilboorg the Russian psychoanalyst, sociologist and historian (and pretty goofy looking guy) writes…

..”Sadism naturally absorbs the fear of death because by actively manipulating and hating [see: Liberals, Obama]  we keep our organism absorbed in the outside world; this keeps self-reflection and the fear of death in a state of low tension.  We feel we are masters of life and death when we hold the fate of others in our hands.  As long as we can continue shooting, we think more of killing than of being killed.”… 

As long as we can continue shooting, we think more of killing than of being killed.

As long as we can continue shooting, we think more of killing than of being killed.

The Aztecs did it like this.

We do it in a thousand ways, from video games to live CNN broadcasts of cruse missiles blowing up apartment buildings full of women and children in Baghdad.  We did it with napalm, cluster bombs and Agent Orange.  We do it with gas, lethal injections and the electric chair.  We do it with drones.  We do it with land mines.  We did it to hundreds of thousands of CHILDREN in Iraq and you expect us to get all bent out of shape for a handful of children in Connecticut and give up our guns?

As a wise gangster once said….. “When killers stop killing they get killed.”

We have been a Nation of Killers since the first white man’s foot hit the beach.

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

IN but not OF

This is the very last I hope to be writing about politics for a long time.  The election is over and after months and months of being bombarded with lies and hate and bullshit from every direction I’m tired.  It was a hard time to deal with, I’m sure, for us all, but, I can only try to explain how it was for me in my little corner of America.

I titled this little essay “IN but not OF” because that is exactly how it feels to me to be living in a place that is “in” America, but, not a place that is at all very much “of” America any more.   I live in Central Virginia on the East flank of the Blue Ridge Mountains between Lynchburg and Charlottesville.  I am closer to Lynchburg than I am to Charlottesville and that makes all the difference.  The two cities are separated by about 70 miles of drop-dead gorgeous scenery and more American history than you can shake a stick at.  At the Charlottesville end we have The University of Virginia (Mr. Jefferson’s School), Monticello, the homes of James Madison and James Monroe, Lewis & Clark and, heading south toward Lynchburg, the Rockfish River and the home of “The Walton Family” (Goodnight John-boy).  For a while there Charlottesville was home to more billionaires than any other city in America, but, lately we have acquired a lot more billionaires and now nobody really knows for sure.

At the other end of the road we have Lynchburg.  If one city can be the opposite of another Lynchburg is the opposite of Charlottesville.   Billionaires don’t live in Lynchburg.  When Civil Rights Laws dictated that black people should have the right to swim in the Lynchburg Public Pools the decent, God fearing, people of Lynchburg decided to fill them all in with dirt.  When those same laws dictated that black children had the right to a public education along side white children a young preacher named Jerry Falwell opened up “Christian Academies” for white children only.  Today that little experiment in profiting from fear and discrimination has grown to be “Liberty University”, the largest Evangelical University on the planet.  Gay people are not permitted to attend.  Democrats are not permitted to organize on campus.  Being caught alone with a member of the opposite sex is something that can get you expelled.  Carrying a loaded  gun to class is permitted, but dancing is not.  Lots of famous rich people live in Charlottesville and on more than one occasion in the past ten years it has been named to the list of Best Places to live in America.  Lynchburg has never been on that list and the only rich people in Lynchburg have the last name of Falwell.  It seems that with the untaxed income the Falwell Cartel, I mean Family, has amassed over the years they have reached the point where they own just about everything in Lynchburg.  The earth itself is believed to be between 6 and 10 thousand years old in Lynchburg.  In Charlottesville it is over 4 billion years old.  Lynchburg voted overwhelmingly Republican yesterday and C-ville, that’s what we locals call Charlottesville, voted Democratic.

Lynchburg Virginia is In America, but, it can no longer be said that it is at all representative Of America.  It is a town on its last legs destined to become a living museum of what went wrong with the Republican Party.  Black people are still niggers and gay people are still abominations who have neglected to pray themselves straight and “chosen” to be gay in Lynchburg.  Planned Parenthood was picketed and driven out of town years ago, long before that kind of thing caught on in other culturally backward towns across our great nation.

Charlottesville has a Whole Foods, Trader Jacks, new Wegman’s on the way and every kind of International and ethnic product and produce you ever heard of.  Lynchburg is a food desert.  Last week it was announced that even the local SEARS is closing and the building was purchased by… you guessed it, “Liberty University” to be a civic center for Christian activities.

Now, some people might be wondering why I would want to live anywhere near Lynchburg Virginia.  Why I would want to expose myself to so much hate and down right primitive behavior.  So I will tell you.  Besides the beautiful countryside, absurdly low taxes and fantastic weather there is the opportunity to study a foreign culture, a dying foreign culture, without having to get even one inoculation.

I spoke to a senior in High School this morning.  She told me that the Senior Class voted in a mock election yesterday and President Obama won overwhelmingly.  While Mom and Dad were voting for Old “Magic Underpants” Mitt the younger generation were all for gay marriage, birth control and equal pay for equal work.

Did I mention something about a dying culture?

 

The GREATEST Threat to AMERICA

I just wanted to jot down a few thoughts on the last debate, or, as we call them here in the South…  the last Dee-Bate.  Like most of you, I’m sure, I was absolutely sickened by the rudeness directed toward poor Mr. Romney by “Obama”.  Where did that come from?  Where did he get the idea that he could say insulting things and get away with it?  It was just so unfair and, if you will excuse me… so Un-American and Un-Presidential to say, or even imply that someone of Mr. Romney’s stature and reputation could, or, would be anything less than honest.  I think it must be a Democrat thing because you never hear Republicans insulting people they disagree with.  Not even that lying, America hating, Communist, TelePrompTer reading, “Community Organizing, Muslim monkey-faced Black B@$!@RD who wants to take away our guns and institute Shirea Law.  You know…. The Kenyan.

But I digress.

The question was asked……  “What is the greatest threat to America?”

The answers given by the candidates were dead wrong.  They blathered on about the economy, China, nuclear weapons and other such nonsense because neither one of them dared to touch the third rail and brand themselves as traitors by telling the truth.  Neither one of them could, or would, dare to break the unwritten, but, most powerful and strictly enforced law of this land.  None would mess with the ultimate TABOO.

What I’m talking about, the greatest REAL threat to America, is our TOTAL inability to self reflect, self criticize and correct our shortcomings.  Even suggesting that America isn’t the best at anything and everything is considered treason and an admission that you hate America.  As a direct result of this ridiculously misplaced national narcissism we are blind, as a culture, to what the rest of the world can clearly see.  Given the choice between knowledge that is uncomfortable and ignorance that will eventually prove deadly we choose ignorance every time.  Rather than recognize that something is broken we choose to procrastinate and pretend that it isn’t.  We fix NOTHING and watch everything get worse because to admit that anything in America isn’t already the best that it can be is, as I stated above, treason.  We have become shameless.   So, we are fucked.

So what’s the greatest threat to America and the American way of life?

Americans….  and the American way of life.

(You may enjoy this)     http://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/

Rude, Crude & Socially Unattractive

“No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute.”  [Paul Gallico]

So, what is the difference between calculated rudeness and abuse?  Is it the “calculated” part that separates the “studied insult” from simple abusive language?  Can abusive language directed toward an adversary be transformed into not only a socially acceptable form of communication, but, a potent weapon?

I think the answer to the last question is a resounding yes!  I have long marveled at the ability of those highly skilled in the art of the “studied insult” to accomplish with humor what can never as effectively be accomplished with debate, or, simple conversation.  I believe it is a form of art that has a very long history in the person of Court Jesters and comedians.  When deflating the Big Shot is what is called for I do not believe there is a more powerful means than laughter.  I do not think anything strikes more fear into the heart of the powerful than the prospect of being laughed at.

So, what stops us from seeing a whole lot more of this… this “studied insult”, this “calculated rudeness”?  Why is it we, as a culture, find this business perfectly acceptable on “Comedy Central”, “The Daily Show” and other designated venues for comedy, but, not in our daily lives, or, political debates such as that ridiculous bit of nonsense that took place in Denver last week?  If it is such a powerful tool for deflating the overly pompous why is its use limited to venues that are designated as “non-serious”… all in fun….. or, not to be taken too seriously?

I guess what I am trying to ascertain is why, in American political life, the use of the “studied insult” and “calculated rudeness” are to debate & discourse what nuclear weapons are to warfare.  Even if we possess them… we dare not use them… AS POLITICIANS.  Comedians can use them.  It’s funny when comedians do.  It’s sometimes devastating when skilled comedians do and everybody I know enjoys it.  But NEVER directly into the face of the politician (or, person) being made to look foolish.   THAT is considered rude, crude and socially unattractive.

I often wonder who made up that rule.  I bet it was the powerful.  I bet I know why and I bet you do too.

I think it is a foolish rule and I would like to see it fall by the wayside in the interest of HONESTY!

Lets face it folks…. “If” politicians can lie through their ass every time they open their mouths in a debate SOMETHING more powerful is necessary to counteract the power of the lie.  That “something” is the artful application of calculated rudeness.

THIS is the kind of technique President Obama should be boning up on for the next debate.  Here is the work of an expert.