Month: September 2016

I Would Prefer Not To

linuxanarchy

I am just another person who has not yet read Moby Dick, but it’s still on my list.

Watching reality TV resembles a Philip K. Dick dystopia, it keeps getting closer to its total eclipse of reality.

Name a television show broadcast in the timeframe 1969 to the present. I probably have not seen it. I did not watch the white Bronco, nor the endlessly falling towers. Wait a generation, then tune in to the Simpson impact and the meaning behind those Twins.

So here is my advice for any unsuspecting reader: ignore top news stories. Innumerable conjectures extrapolate scant evidence into innumerable dead-ends. Wild-ass propaganda flourishes as every opportunity for a story blossoms, petals drop and the wind takes them all.

Study themes completely unrelated to the:

…major news story we are now following. We will continue to track this story as information becomes available. Stay tuned to WWTF for complete coverage of (FILL IN THE BLANK), our top news story.” 

Thus creating an urge or crave to keep listening, keep watching, keep supporting our sponsors. The band drones on.

I would prefer not to

One afternoon in 1971 I was discussing George Orwell with Dr. William R. Siddall, then head of the Geography Dept. at Kansas State. He had not read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” but I piqued his interest with my personal gleaning. It became required reading for the entire staff.

politics-and-the-english

Reread the good stuff with an open, but not gaping, mind.

When I graduated Bill Siddall suggested that I read widely. So I did. A solid memory.

Goethe suggested that Western Civilization might have taken its direction upon a Homeric turn rather than a Christian model.  Daniel Mendelsohn wrote “Englishing the Iliad” for the New Yorker. I took a plunge.

“The decline of the West” by Hans Günther:

Goethe had a premonition of this decline of the West: even in October 1801 he remarked in conversation with the Countess von Egloffstein, that spiritual emptiness and lack of character were spreading — as if he had foreseen what today characterises the most celebrated literature of the Free West. It may be that Goethe had even foreseen, in the distant future, the coming of an age in which writers would make great profits by the portrayal of sex and crime for the masses.”

from Goethe and the Indo-European religiosity

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Alternate history, geography, language, sentients…

I now return you to your normally scheduled program, in progress.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

Sudden Solitude in a Crowded Desert

Here I elaborate on a poem by Peter Schreiner: “Earth.”  Its text, contained in the graphic below, is available on Schreiner’s web-site Crows Head Soup. A state of being viewed with the vegan in mind. Awareness replaces normalcy, the gentle side of being aware is naturally repelled by flesh, fur and bone when known as resources, nourishment, craving. Normality is the unquestioning exploitation of fellow sentient beings alive today on this planet. 99% “living” in factory-fresh farms.

earth-was-never-my-home

Borrowing a favorite phrase from a seldom followed play of T.S. Eliot,  The Family Reunion. A Greek chorus explains the characters contained on the theater stage.

Sudden Solitude in a Crowded Desert

The concept became a byline for me one day while listening to the audio for this play. I was on the back porch, it was the late 90’s. Days of very early social media connected my life with others by a 1200 baud modem. Three States and a river. OH IN KY.

Very few Google searches yield much information on the Unix box located in a small room at the local phone company, TriState Online.

This link takes you to the full text at archive.org. You can search for “sudden solitude” there.

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Sir Alec Guinness’ excerpt is central to the theme of the play.

Sudden Solitude played into a concept in that poem “Earth.” The mashup that occurs when you imagine the inexplicable in everyday life.  Things unquestioned in a polite society proud of its dominion. All matters familiar, ordinary and comforting (comfort food) in a moment of unexpected insight. A spinning coin flipped skyward that reveals the unanticipated: solitude/crowded.

Privileged consumer of all things animal from marrow to fur, then quite suddenly you become a witness, then a consumer of no thing animal.

Cognitive dissonance sets in when you identify enlightenment from the vegan point of view. At this point I fervently hope that readers remaining to read this far are not already convicted vegans. Dismissal out of hand is something you must expect when promoting marginal epiphanies. billziegler1947 is a tribute to the music of the crickets, I’m actually proud of that tribute.

My comment on “Earth”:

“Secular lands” evokes imposed national borders for me. Each sentient being I meet opens a complex but complete universe contained in one transient body: distinct personages/animalages. Borders are as much cage bars as they are expressions of nationality, but they are all arbitrary. Anyway that’s my reader reaction. Hope it makes sense to readers of these words.

It feels good to revive Sudden Solitude in a Crowded Desert, a thread to weave into the discussion here.

Thanks for reading.

Chris Hedges Interviews Stanley Cohen

I now report back on my favorite human rights attorney (bar none), Stanley Cohen. I am here to put his name forward. A good place to start is his blog: Caged but Undaunted. Chris Hedges interviewed Stanley on RT last month and it’s posted at On Contact.

So what’s new? Attica lives, written 4 days ago, is. Here we have a retrospective from 2016 on the prison riot of 1971.  This Friday, September 9, marks the 45th anniversary of the rebellion. Long penetrating read. Five stars.

attica-stanley-cohen
In Caged but Undaunted

You can tune in to @StanleyCohenLaw for live coverage and commentary first hand. I have not posted much on Twitter recently, but what I’ve written and recommended there is @billziegler1947. 

Possession of a human soul is the resource Stanley uses to represent super marginalized people (like Palestinians) trapped by powers that still be. His clients are people who speak truth to power, I recommend that muchly. 

stanley-cohen-haaretz

The IRS is still a go-to place in the federal government for expedient rulings requested by other arms of the federal government.  Their long arm searched for secreted funds but found nothing. That did not stop them from incarcerating Mr. Cohen in the Canaan PA prison-industrial facilities while they continued their search. By the way, they still haven’t found anything on him. 

No one touches the thief with multiple billion dollar caches and über high-level positions. Think large in this environment and expect things to come your way, such as the Presidency.

The idea was to silence him. Instead they gave Stanley Cohen insight into the inside. His witness is invaluable for all of us out there who believe that justice is not deferrable in a human society.

attica
Attica 1971

 

To paraphrase Joe Friday “Just none of the facts ma’am, just none of the facts.”

#UpTheRebels

Thanks for reading.

The Tyranny of the Majority

Majority rule is an expedient way to exercise authority over the unwanted and to marginalize unpopular ethnic groups, such as Native Palestinians in Palestine.

That guy on the $20 bill made the South safe for democracy. Somewhere in Jacksonian Democracy lies a lesson, one learned by 10,000 despots: if undesirables are out of the picture, they are not a problem. Future generations can safely and comfortably observe “mistakes were made.”

After the Trail of Tears, America was made safe for slaveholders again. Cherokees are for westerns or in teepees next to a Stuckeys. Have you heard this one: “I’m 1/24th Cherokee.” Really?

trail.of.tears
Look up Nakba for a similar trail of tears.

America was great I hear. But them Indians got it made now, every tribe has a casino. Sad to say, they’re fat and lazy and coddled by Washington. Things never change, I guess. Wink. Nod.

Grocery stores near reservations are food deserts. If a vehicle becomes available a real supermarket is only 70 miles away. While you are 70 miles away from home you can stock up on health care services and relax a while at the local casino. Chill with your fellow ingrates.

Native Americans are number one in death by police.(The Counted: 2016) among all ethnic groups.

The Guardian compiles this database, but for some reason such information is not collected in the US.

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DJT is not a reader, but profound ignorance is no barrier to enormous wealth or monstrous feats of racism. Just a casual side note.

Ethnic cleansing silences voices of dissent.

Israel expelled 700,000 native Palestinians in 1948. Today the growth of settlements in the West Bank make population distribution look a lot like reservations in the formerly unoccupied American West.