In the Land of The Stupids

Shakespeare said something along the lines that, “There is a destiny that shapes our ends.” I can’t argue with that. History shows me that both people and nations can fail in spectacular fashion; the only drawback to that is that it often takes longer than we wish it to. Most of us hope that blackguard nations and individuals would go direct to the compost heap without the necessity of the agonizing, protracted drama of lives injured in the process.

Were the American people always this stupid? Is it a generational thing; do certain generations back up over a metaphorical La Guardia of reincarnation and chomp at the bit for their chance to perform before the world? I often wonder if there might not be a conveyor belt that moves through dimensional space, sorting and labeling characters for their moment to “strut and fret their hour upon the stage.” I wonder about a lot of things because I don’t get the payoff. I have yet to see where being exposed as an idiot and a liar is a good career move; but wait a minute... it seems like it is.

Enormous power and influence is casually invested in people who would have a hard time managing a Dairy Queen, much less a nation. Media figures, lacking both truth and the eloquence necessary to convincingly read a grocery list are paid huge sums of money and honored as fonts of wisdom. Something is wrong with this picture. When you investigate the thing it appears that all of this exists because the audience is just, just... really, really stupid; have they always been this stupid? ...off and on... off and on; this brings me back to the ambulatory cordwood stacked up over metaphorical La Guardia.

It’s funny how the environment will mirror the personnel passing through it. The soundtrack compliments it. The leaders reflect the led. The quality of the air and water mirrors the intellectual and emotional pollutions of those ingesting it. Stupid people lead stupid lives and everything mirrors their passage through a stupid world to a stupid end. Things that make no natural or mathematical sense make sense there. Lies become the fabric of life. Commercials for things that kill have the impact on a stupid mind of things that give life.

Everything in the land of stupid makes a stupid kind of sense. Going backwards looks like going forwards. Painful things appear to be necessary things even when the pain is a reminder of the results of practicing stupid things. The stupider and more unreasonable everything becomes in reality, the more reality is adjusted in perception to make stupid look smart. It becomes okay to live and eat and breathe stupid. Fat is the new thin. Stupid is the new smart. Leaders who lack only the red neck kerchief of the Khmer Rouge appear positively Jeffersonian. Everything adapts and adjusts to explain everything in terms of stupid.

Lies are not lies; they are adjusted truths that have been explained in terms of stupid. The mindless violence for gain is seen to be a cost effective investment for the general good. Pointless sacrifice of the many for the benefit of the few is, in the stupid perspective, a pervasive boon for the greatest good of the greatest number of people.

Student loans are cut; possibly because the education received no longer has the same value of educations formerly received… but more likely because tiny savings are needed to offset massive expenditures upon stupid policies that have a greater value than that of an educated population. Tiny savings cannot offset massive expenditures. Oh yes they can. They make perfect fiscal sense in the land of The Stupids.

Cutting Medicare and food stamps and social services and all manner of benefits that would seem to be hallmarks of a successful society are proven to be wise and compassionate in the land of the stupids. Those who cannot spend the interest on their gains are given additional gains and those with little or nothing are bent over a barrel and a nation of stupids applauds as they are bent over the barrel.

Political leaders, not content with their personal return on their positions must resort to fraud and theft to further enhance their holdings and this is defined as savvy and perfectly legal in the land of the stupids. The foreign policy of the nation is run from a small country in the Middle East that is the source of the majority of the trouble in that location and this is defined as legal and permissible in the land of the stupids. The leader of this small country tells a former leader of this small country that they don’t have to worry about anything that happens in the land of the stupids because they control this country. The hard physical evidence of this exchange is documented and reported in the news and easily obtained but... it didn’t actually get said and nobody heard it exactly as it was said exactly because... because... they are stupid? So called terrorists that were reputed to have attacked the stupid nation are witnessed aboard gambling boats owned by a lobbyist who supports the government entrusted with the protection of the nation and this is seen as perfectly okay in a nation of stupids.

Massive buildings collapse in free fall and in defiance of physics as the result of a fire caused by the impact of a plane (hijacked by some terrorists of which nearly half were found to be living somewhere else after they died) into a building designed to withstand the impact of the plane where no buildings of similar type and even buildings less securely constructed have ever collapsed before; even when the fires raged for hours and hours longer. This is easily explained in the land of the stupids. The owner of a building not hit by anything is recorded as saying they would bring down the building and immediately the building that wasn’t hit by anything comes down. This owner had weeks before acquired billions of dollars worth of terror insurance and so on and so on but, it didn’t actually happen in the land of the stupids even though it did happen and it didn’t really mean anything.

Hurricanes wipe out an entire city and towns and villages and coastlines all about and nothing was done to provide for the victims during the storm or in the aftermath... slowly, like shit flowing uphill in January assistance now bleeds through the filters of contractors connected to the government that didn’t do anything and, wait a minute... Shit flows like Karo syrup uphill in January all the time in the land of the stupids.

Lies become truth; hindrance becomes help, theft becomes charity, treachery is patriotism and everything is everything that you want it to be when you need it to be whatever you want it to be in the land of the stupids. I read a book somewhere, a novel, that documented all of this and it didn’t sound like a very nice place; containing as it did rat facemasks and nothing being what it seemed but it turns out it is a very nice place indeed in the land of the stupids. In the land of the stupids the man with no brain is king. In the land of the stupids, stupid behavior, suicidal behavior and any kind of behavior that assaults the host body engaged in stupid behavior is considered virtuous and smart behavior because of the high concentration of stupidity that it contains.

In the land of the stupids when you eat your own young you are actually being fruitful and multiplying. In the land of the stupids a country that stood in opposition to Stalinist policies can be applying textbook Stalinist policies taken from the Stalinist textbooks and the critics can be called Stalinists. In the land of the stupids the mouthpieces of the stupids can screech like crows and abuse like alcoholic parents and are pronounced to be fair, reasonable and eloquent voices bravely raised above the screeching of crows.

In the land of the stupids two and two does not make four. In the land of the stupids you can look right at something and not see it. In the land of the stupids something can be made simply and perfectly clear and immediately become complex and perfectly unclear. In the land of the stupids it is clear that you can be never be too stupid or too stupid.

“Although it won’t apply in the land of the stupids it is a truth that if something becomes scarce in one location it will concentrate in another”... he said; shaking the very dust of that city from his sandals.

Visible sings: ♫ Have I Got This Right? Talking 9/11 Blues ♫
'Have I Got This Right?' is track no. 2 of 10 on Visible's 2002 album
'911 was an Inside Job'
Lyrics (pops up)

Tookie Williams Goes Free...

Tookie Williams left the California prison system a few hours ago. He must be feeling pretty good right about now. It may be that he suspected it all along; that he knows what I and some few others know… That death ends nothing. I am sure he now knows that everything really is backwards; that the body was a coffin, that you wake up when you die, that it is 'more real' in the after life and that it is 'less real' here.

He went out with a calm dignity that further convinces me that he didn't do the murders that he was charged with and that the state set him up. In consideration of the personalities of his accusers and their subsequent careers I smell more than one rat. The tale of the shotgun under the bed at the home of James and Ester Garrett, who were being investigated for the murder of their crime partner…well that charge was dropped. And the shotgun shells came from a store that Garrett had robbed the year before. But I won't bore you with all the inconsistencies, not when you got Fox News and all the other big gang media to help you form an opinion

It sure would have been nice if they had had any real evidence except that of people under heavy threat from the po-lice; if they had had just one civilian witness, one fingerprint, one anything. It does make you wonder how, in four brutal murders there was no evidence except for LA Confidential style testimony. Here you have a young man doing an urban Badlands all over the place and nada… just nada. A reason would have been nice. Gain certainly wasn't a reason. It would make you wonder, if you had a brain. You might even feel something if you had a heart. If you had any sense of mystery and awe you would surely nod and thank your lucky stars that you weren't Tookie on the streets of LA

Only a fool believes that a man of Tookie's criminal stature and standing would just, apparently for recreational purposes and small gain, go out on a murder spree (the way many of you, unable to engage in a rigorous demands of bowling- or to actually fit on the lanes- might spend an evening getting in and out of your cart at a miniature golf course for whites only.)

It makes all the sense in the world that he was railroaded off of the streets.

I recognize that, according to the cattle grazing across the land of the free, Tookie was a wolf. I won't bore you with talk about environments and economics. I won't go into the initial reason that the Crips came into being. Do I have to mention the date that Tookie got sent down or how many Crip members there were? Have any of you bothered to match dates with timelines? Do you think Tookie managed International Crips Assoc. from inside?

The Republican Party is a gang. How many people have they killed? Bush's press mouth says they killed 30,000 Iraqi's with the help of another gang, The Dems. They were careful to note that these weren't 'official' figures but taken from official media sources. Are you that goddamn stupid? Why wouldn't the government have the figures? Why would the government need the media for figures? The reason is that they killed well over 100,000 Iraqi's, that's why, and you don't care and you don't question; you don't connect the dots and the hand never leaves the sleeve.

Back around so many hundreds of years ago, after the fall of another decadent hog wallow of a society, that had had a moment or two of grandeur before it fell, there were a lot of gangs running around; the Huns, the Teuts, the AngloS, the Goths, the Vandals… so many… Honorious went butt-up and Stilicho went down and the gangs went to town. Where did we get whatever came after all of that; the cities on the Danube and wherever human rats congregate in search of sex and wealth and power? We got it from the gangs. Civilization always comes out of disorder.

Gangs have roamed America since America got here. Gangs in uniforms wiped out the Indians. Nobody went to jail for that. Gangs brought black men in chains from Africa. Nobody went to jail for that. Gang bosses machine-gunned miners and burned their children in their tents. Gangs have always been here. Don't talk to me about how Tookie formed a gang and then the gang killed thousands and thousands of people and how he wouldn't get down on his knees and suck the great state of California's dick and say, "Massa, massa dis po nigga did rong." Fuck the great state of California and Arnolt too, for that matter. If he didn't kill those people he doesn't need to say so. He doesn't need to keep repentin' and 'pologizin and bowing and scrapin and "Load! Load! plezz doan let me die hea in dis col col jail. I'ze be a goooood nigga now."

The Pubs and the Dems are the big gangs in town and they don't brook no competition. The competition goes to jail. When people run foul of Mac Daddy Bush's drug cartel, they go to jail. Shit happens to the poppy and war happens cause of Poppy. Don't talk to me about gangs. Once gangs have been around long enough they get that fancy logo, they get the traditions the red leather chairs with the gold rivets, the limos and the ladies and the young boys… they get the fancy hand signs. What's the difference between the Mason's and the 18th St. Boyz? The amount of power. Both of them got the hand signs. Don't talk to me about gangs.

Bilderberger is a gang. The Council on Foreign Relations is a gang. The Royal Society to Tongue the Ass of the Queen is a gang; no not Elton, Lizabeth. United Fruit is a gang. The longer a gang has been around, and depending on whether it was successful at surviving, the stronger and the richer and the more respectable that gang got. Eventually that gang gets laws and po-lice and gets to put upstart gang leaders to death.

Tookie went out cool. Tookie was amused that the old gang techs couldn't find a vein. Tookie got 12 minutes more of 'this' life. Well, he'd hung around in The Man's leeeeeegitimate prison for plenty years, he could spare a few more minutes. Maybe he knew that he was just going through a door the others couldn't see. Everybody goes through that door… living or dead or whatever you want to call it. Tookie walked right out. Yellow-back George won't walk out like that. Sneerin' Dick'em Cheney won't walk out like that. Don't talk to me about gangs. I know where gangs come from and I know why. I know about order upon disorder and I know who it serves 'here' and who it serves 'there'. Hey, Jean Lafitte was a pirate. I guess he had a gang too.

The big gangs got lots of small gangs that do the things the big gangs can't do. Right now little gangs are shooting the shit out of people in the Middle East, planting car bombs, pulling fingernails and rapin' and pillagin' as gangs are known to do; "rape and pillage, rape and pillage, let's go out and burn a native village, you can't have one, you can't have one, you can't have one without the ottthhhhhhher." And all of this because a big gang engineered an assault; a PNAC new Pearl Harbor manifestation of a new manifesto, on a couple of big buildings in New York City. Shit! Larry Silverman hardly had time to say "get me some terror insurance" (before the fact) before his building went down out of plain fear… or wait a minute, they've got him on tape saying "We're gonna bring it down." Don't talk to me about gangs.

I want to take a moment here to thank Tookie Williams for his outstanding work while he was here and to congratulate him on escaping from the big gang's jail house. I'll close with a memory I have of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnie owned some stock in Planet Hollywood and it so happened I was at the Lahaina P.H one night when Arnie was in town and it so happened that I was sitting there when Arnie went by my table surrounded by a bunch of big guys in suits. My initial impression, which remains with me, is the fear on Arnie's face. The other impression was that he was a lot smaller than I thought he would be. He was smaller than me, probably wider (grin) but smaller. He looked like a little guy and he looked scared even though he was surrounded by leeeeeegitimate gang protective guys. I turned to my friend and said, "So that's what you get for success?" My friend said, "I wouldn't want to be him." "Me neither" I replied.

In memoriam of Stanley Tookie Williams for his outstanding tale of redemption and all of his efforts for the betterment of the human race; for his courage in not getting down on his knees for the big gang leaders and for standing tall and with humble dignity in the face of false charges and for the creation of a tabla rasa in the ethers as a path laid out to be walked later on for anyone who later on goes astray. Go with God.

Visible sings: ♫ Every Day ♫
'Every Day' is track no. 11 of 11 on Visible's 2001 album 'God in Country'
Lyrics (pops up)

Quo Vadis, Tookie Williams?

All through the course of American history political leaders have made decisions based on factors other than vox populi. Presently, the only vox populi getting any kind of a hearing is vox Midas. Many a leader has swept into office on promises and many a promise has died on the vine for want of water. One can’t know what the message of vox populi is any more because that message is fashioned by vox media without any actual reference to vox populi. In any rare instance where vox populi is resourced, the words are imbedded beforehand and then shaped to fit in the way the questions are fashioned. Anyone unaware of this is watching too much vox news.

Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams stands accused of shot-gunning a convenience store clerk for the princely sum of $120.00 and then a series of 3 Asian motel owners for a grand total of $100.00. Tookie was at the same time one of the founders, along with Raymond Washington and (according to vox media) head of The Crips; a blue headscarf wearing gang who was the counterpoint to The Bloods; a red headscarf wearing gang. The Crips were formed to combat random neighborhood violence. So far as I know, shot-gunning convenience store workers and motel owners wasn’t in the charter.

The question you have to ask yourself is, “Would the head of what came to be the largest, most organized gang in the United States really go out and small time murder for chump change?” It doesn’t make sense does it? Tookie says he didn’t do it and I believe him. I believe him because my common sense tells me it’s just completely out of character for his role. Tookie isn’t a stupid man; anything but. Does this make any kind of sense? Can you say LA Confidential? I thought you could.

Was Tookie Williams a bad man? According to our imaginary yardstick, which has Charles Manson at one end and a Bambi-faced soccer mom at the other, the answer would have to be yes. Would it be fair to say that, using your logic and objective reasoning capacity; Tookie was probably responsible for murder and mayhem along his way to San Quentin? I’d have to say, “No doubt” If you asked me if he was responsible for the murders he is accused of I would have to say, “It’s unlikely.” If you asked me, "Did the LA police department set him up based on the rational that he’s guilty of it somewhere?" I would have to say; “That seems the most likely scenario.”

Our prison system was developed by Benjamin Franklin and The Quakers. The idea was to put a man in a cell with a Bible and hope that repentance and rehabilitation would be the result. Essentially this means that the idea of redemption is a basic ingredient in the process of incarceration. What is the point of parole I might ask? What is justice?

Murder is against the law right? Well Dick Cheney and George Bush and their band of neo-cons have murdered tens of thousands of people recently but they are not in jail. Why are they not in jail? We know that they murdered tens of thousands of people under false pretenses and as the result of known lies. We know this. How are they any different that Tookie Williams? They are much worse. We know that numerous business associates and political cronies of Bush and Cheney have been indicted for massive theft and fraud. How is this behavior any different than that of any gang members; they didn’t use a shot-gun? Okay.

While he has been in prison these past 20 odd years Tookie has been doing a lot of work. Tookie has worked to reform himself and the gang system he helped to bring into being. He has been nominated several times for the Nobel Peace prize. I will not here list his many accomplishments. These are things you can ‘choose’ to learn for yourself. Tookie came up on the rough streets of LA. God only knows what he went through as a kid. I’m not surprised at what happened to him. George Bush and Dick Cheney were given the finest of educations and pampered every step of their lives. They wound up murdering many thousands of times more than Tookie Williams. This is a fact and there is no getting around it. Of course you can attempt to justify it. Would you say that Bush and Cheney have since woven something as great out of their disordered past as has Tookie Williams? No you could not say this.

I’ve been to prison. I knew men like Tookie Williams. I’ve got a blue bandanna I still wear today. It doesn’t make me a Crip, even if one gave it to me. I know something about gangs and the men in them. I know how these gangs come about and the circumstances that give birth to them. Are gangs a good thing? No. Not on the streets of LA and not in the corridor of power in Washington D.C. The only difference in these two gangs is the size of the take.

A man’s life is not the sum of a few moments. The sum of a life is in the totality of the life. It is in what the life comes to. Tookie Williams is an odyssey of redemption. One might say he, “once was lost but now is found.” George Bush will never accomplish as much good as Tookie Williams.

Will Tookie get the chance to go on with his compelling efforts? It doesn’t look good. It doesn’t look good in a country where another governor once mocked an inmate on her way to execution. That governor was George Bush. He laughed and made fun of her on her way to die. Her name was Karla Faye Tucker and her story is a lot like Tookie’s. She made a big mistake when she was young and she spent the next fourteen years on death row repenting and seeking redemption. She went off to die with the governor’s laughter ringing in her ears.

We all die. It has been said that we do not all die but that we are all changed. I won’t address the varieties of meaning there. I will submit that Tookie has already died and been reborn but I suspect that means nothing to those who do not understand the meaning of, “there but for fortune go you and I.” The only difference between Tookie and you and I is that Tookie knows the date. As Samuel Johnson said "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

The issue here is not what Tookie did or did not do once; it is what he has done since. Either redemption is a part of our system or it is not. Special circumstance should be a two way street. Sometimes the example of a person’s life begins to live in many lives. They stand for possibilities. They remind us of the possible. Killing Tookie Williams does not kill the man accused of particular crimes. It kills the man he has become. We effectively kill the example of hope and transformation that he presently stands for.

What sort of a terrible irony is it that permits the wholesale murders of men like George Bush and Dick Cheney? These swine in human form laugh at their deeds and their victims while dining in the high tower. Their crimes against their own nation and other nations exceed the crimes of Tookie Williams to an immeasurable degree.

When and if Tookie dies he will have paid his bills. He will have done something wonderful with his life; made all the more wonderful given his background and his circumstances. When George Bush and Dick Cheney die, hard laughter will accompany and greet them and God have mercy on their souls.

Vox populi... who knows? Yet in our history many a leader has made many a decision that did not reflect vox populi. Many a leader has made a decision of conscience. Many a leader has acted upon advice and acted against advice. Sometimes a leader finds the unspoken hope in a vox populi that does not know the sound of it’s own voice until someone speaks for them. The job of a leader is not to follow it is to lead. How often have we not known what we felt until it touched our hearts? Hopefully something touches Governor Schwarzenegger’s heart.

Visible sings: ♫ The Mocking of Karla Faye Tucker ♫
'The Mocking of Karla Faye Tucker' is track no. 3 of 10 on Visible's 2002 album
'911 was an Inside Job'
About this song (pops up)

Stand on Zanzibar meets Childhood's End

My days are long and I’m free range. Only so much happens inside the coop. In the coop time presses down on the captive flock, making them wider and, I suppose, juicier for the palate of other coop dwellers higher on the food chain. But all coops have some things in common and their share of pecking deaths. The more they press together, the tighter the insanity and the more combustive the explosions against the resistance of the mass.

In rat experiments, when rats are confined in a small space, the larger male rats will lose all interest in the females and begin to rape the younger males. Life-forms in captivity exhibit common pathologies that are mirrored in prison life and congested cities. Weird tics become commonplace and people talk to themselves. If you can’t go out and you get pushed in, alcohol and sundry open a larger landscape by altering the headroom of the earphones. Of course this is just a way of giving a different separation to the sound. It’s an appearance; an impression. It isn’t real. It gets less real as different unrealities are compared.

When insanity becomes the norm interesting rules of behavior emerge. Coping devices come into play to order irrational behavior along predictable lines. The cops can’t pull you over in your living room. If you need to color your world because of the chiaroscuro effect, that’s understandable. If it’s illegal but ubiquitous, then further adjustments are made to demarcate when and how you allow the unallowable. If the pressure to kill for space becomes too great it makes sense to do the killing somewhere else. The resulting pressure decrease is then felt at a distance from the blood-spattered walls of the proxy killing fields.

Pipelines of hatred and love are no different than oil and gas pipelines. Breathing allowances have to be made and the technology is formed to compensate for the vagaries of the product. The sex pipeline is the big one. The boiler room is impressive and the dials remind one of the cockpit of a 747. As the natural flow of the sex oil is routed through increasingly complex ways the interpretation of the following behaviors becomes equally complex. New rationalizations are required for things that people do; things that were once considered strange, even pathological, have to be discussed and described and made reasonable. Somewhere between Jerry Springer and the soccer-mom Wicca-weekends lies the holiday table set with the bounty of the land.

As the rules become increasingly complex the reactions from the overview multiply. The message on the t-shirt has to pass through filters. The conversation has to ride on rails. The eye contact must steady at neutral or go to pre-fab. While the controls on the personal tighten, the controls on the broadcasts become more lax. You can’t say what you hear. You can’t behave as you observe. Television is one thing, real life is another. So… the objective mind becomes a camouflaged, hunted beast and the subjective mind becomes a deranged wolverine.

Everything gets mirrored so, if you can’t see it, you’re not watching. Well, it’s not surprising when your entire makeup becomes defensive that you would lose objectivity; and then there’s all the makeup too. And you are told that what you see is not what you see. You are told what you hear is not what you hear and what you think is not what you think. You are even told you are not you. The outsider is way outside. As the press for individuality meets the resistance of enforced conformity, terrorism comes after the pipelines of human expression. It’s not terrorism actually; it’s the self looking for a way out. The individual route is perilous indeed. So group individuality takes over. Individual groups now compete where individuals once did. The pack mentality rises. Scientology Black is playing Raelian Red on ESP this Sunday. The tattooed biker moms merge with the pierced death rockers in detailed legal documents filed in the courts. A new lobby is born and the power of collected masses against collected masses wearing team colors fills the stands. A strange glossolalia of the new Pentecost is forming a holographic Jesus in the air above the high tension lines. This Jesus wears shades. This Jesus pimp dances with the Whore of Babylon. When you’re drowning in the ocean inside yourself and you don’t want to die you’ve got to split in two to find a helping hand and maybe split again. Not everybody likes everybody here. Somebody has to die.

As each new weird replaces the old, an army of therapists sort out the minutiae and new allowances are made. The bottom line in every transition is the adaptation of market forces to how the cereal box is going to be designed; Brother Love’s anal lube for the backdoor kundalini facing in. As the lost is more lost the private intensity must mirror your face alone. Everything else is too strange and so the image must increasingly be the solitary intensity of your face upon itself.

In strange tropical landscapes. market forces have determined that regulated bacchanalias are pipelining requirements to off-set the cubicle pressure and the polyester rash. Mad power presses against mad power presses have dictated the need for whips and chains and the ugly definitions of your bad self at the hands of Domination Mom. As the instantaneous appearance of products on the shelf meets the transforming puberty of the generational edge the mall becomes the paper route and the baby-sitting gig as the currency of flesh is exchanged for the currency of product and youth is recaptured by old men with money. It’s okay but it’s against the law. It’s really okay if your selective group mass has merged with the enforcement-end group mass. No matter what, examples have to be made, just for the salacity of the headlines and market forces. Sooner or later, Stand on Zanzibar meets Childhood’s End.

And what is all of this? How important is this moment and its strange apparel? It’s a belch at one end and a fart at the other. It’s just a temporary digestive condition brought about by a wide diet and stress at work. The six pack didn’t help but a good nights sleep will; pretty colorful dreams though, not that you can remember them now. The system is self-regulating. It wants to come back to the center. Of course, the constant repetition of behavior is where chronic got its name… but even that gets regulated. Everything gets regulated. Little systems get big attitudes. It probably comes about because the little system thinks it’s a big system. It’s like the kid in 3rd grade who insisted he was Superman. And as long as he didn’t try to fly from the top of the house it would probably pass. Some times it doesn’t and Superman has to get clever when he grows up.

Looking into the wheels in the watch can be a fascinating exercise. Nobody sane wants to be a cog and yet they never make the association between what they see and where they are. It’s as if they don’t think they are really there even though they discuss the details of the process more than anything else with everyone else. Minniver Cheevy dances with Paris Hilton in The Overlook Hotel ballroom. You would have to be drunk wouldn’t you?

Ah well, there’s nothing wrong with longing to escape. The problem is more a matter of how and where. In the meantime, one machine stamps out the goods and, at the other end, the same machine reduces the product back to the original elements and then feeds it on to a conveyer belt that loops back to the beginning. The soundtrack changes along with the lights until there’s nothing but the whirring of the projector in a dark room somewhere in LA as The Son of Group Therapy meets It Came from Beneath the Sea of Recovery.

Visible and The Critical List: ♫ The Clicking Mandibles ♫
'The Clicking Mandibles' is track no. 4 of 8 on Visible and The Critical List's 1987 album
'La Vierge Sperme Danceur'
About this song (pops up)

It's all about the MONEY!!!

Money!!! It’s the big one. It’s bigger than God. It’s bigger than God in the minds and the lives of God’s biggest front men; people like Ralph Reed and Pat ‘hitman’ Robertson. If money and the power it grants has a greater attraction that the source of all power in the minds of those who- we’re told- work for the source of all power; how much greater must the effect of money be on the rest of us who aren’t washed in the blood? It’s got to be narcotic.

So you have probably asked yourself, if you are one of the 10% of the world with a still functioning objective reasoning capacity; how come hardly anyone in Congress (both houses), in the ‘leeeeeegitimate media’ and… in the religious sector has had anything to say about the colossal graft and avalanche of lies that are the hallmark of this criminal administration? It’s a good question isn’t it? How come nary a congressman or a senator has taken to the bully pulpit to rouse the populace?

One possibility is that, perhaps, some few have but the spotlight of attention is not focused upon their efforts. But you know and I know that anyone with enough Crusader Rabbit in them can make the waves if they want to; can go to the barricades, can stand on a street corner, can grab airtime by sheer force of passion and conviction. It can be done. It isn’t being done.

Jack Abramoff and his sleazy, faux-Godfather persona gives us a schematic for the whole enchilada; if we are willing to see it. Word has it, in the actually ‘leeeeeegitimate media’ world of the bloggers, that up to 60 members of Congress are to some degree implicated in the Abramoff scandal. That’s 60, as in 6 with a 0 after it. That’s a lot of legislators. That’s enough legislators to overstuff a Greyhound bus.

It’s simple math and I’m hoping you are up to it because I am going to throw some logic in too and it might require you to chew gum and pay attention at the same time. I promise if you try to understand that I will do my best at my end. Okay… how do you get into Congress? You get into Congress by attracting people’s attention and getting them to vote for you. How do you attract their attention? You have to advertise. How do you advertise? You give someone money to film commercials; print posters and bumper stickers, place ads on radio and television, laminate billboards and all of what you know they have to do. You have to hire people to do many, many things. Doors have to be knocked on, phones have to be worked; get the picture? And if the other guy has more MONEY than you then he can get the message out more comprehensively. Does this make sense mathematically and logically? I believe it does.

How do you get this MONEY that you need? Traditionally people send you donations. Of course that’s not going to be enough. You need MONEY from PAC’s and corporations. Do all of these sources expect a return on their investment? You bet they do. What does this mean? This means you are there to serve their interests or… you won’t be there. The other guy will get the MONEY and you will lose.

What if, and it does happen- if only rarely- you’re not in it for the MONEY? Well then… young boys and girls might begin to appear; that accounts for a percentage. You attend a fund-raiser and coincidentally your picture is taken with an organized crime figure. You attend an affair that turns out to be something else entirely but… you ‘were’ there. Deeply funded private detective agencies scour your background and, if they can’t find anything, well, they just make it up. It’s a Photoshop world baby. But let’s face it… anyone who wants to become a politician has got something wrong with him/her anyway…usually. There’s no difference between the religious snake oil salesman and the politicians. It’s the same grease and the same hair.

So when you see it’s quiet...too quiet...think about it. Think about the arms twisting behind the backs of the ones who bent over for the opportunity to bend you over. No honest or decent soul holds their peace when organized crime is running the country. And make no mistake… the Bush Family is a crime family. From Jeb Bush’s connections to the offshore Florida boat casinos, to Neil Bush’s S&L scams to George W.’s front-boy work for the corporations and crime lords to Mac-daddy’s drug business and the BCCI, you are dealing with ‘organized crime’. Try to imagine what happens when you fuck with these people.

What if you really don’t care about the MONEY? Do you care about your family?
Everybody can be hurt somewhere and that’s why it’s so quiet...too quiet.


But somehow it comes out...somehow; not all of it by any means. But somehow we know through a variety of ways; through courageous bloggers, through honest web sites like WhatReallyHappened... because of brave prosecutors like Patrick Fitzgerald and the odd whistle blower and outraged citizen. There is some kind of mysterious power in the universe that presses the truth out before our eyes. Never before, except in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia or Red China has the press been such a catamite. And once again… where does the press get its MONEY? Its MONEY comes from corporations.

The culture and the nation are terminally corrupt and, as always with corruption, eventually it destroys the host body. Are there enough pharmaceuticals and band aids to save the patient? Well... which solution makes more MONEY? Maybe you can render down the body components for more than you can get for keeping the patient alive. I’ll leave it to your presumed intelligence to reason out how this is in fact happening already in terms of downsizing and outsourcing and Frankenstein recycling.

When you are watching a stage presentation, or a concert, you are only seeing the performance. It takes a trained eye to note all of the other things taking place that makes the performance so effective. It takes knowledge of the process to know and understand all of what had to be accomplished before the presentation even began. Most folk are neither inclined nor equipped for this. Politicians and crime families and religious organizations know that you only have to appeal to the lowest common denominator to make your nut and… this is why ‘dumbing down’ is going down at such a remarkable rate. The stupider you can make the rank and file the greater your success rate. If you’re going to be really outrageous in your scams, why then, you just make their lives a little more desperate or the distractions more pervasive. Take a hard, clear look at what I am saying. What kind of music are you hearing on the radio? The news is not presented. It is manufactured. Bad food makes you stupid too, ...but I digress.

I’d like to say wakeup but I know what you did yesterday and how much you drank last night. I know what time you went to bed and what kind of shape you’ve been in. The good news is that when your house catches on fire you may well sleep through it and never realize you are dead; not any more than you were ever actually conscious that you were alive. The bad news is that you didn’t wake up and it won’t be an open casket funeral and, oh yeah, you’re dead...

To live a passionate and noble existence is a grand thing. To intensely feel the power of being alive and to reach for your highest capacity has a return that can’t be measured in terms of MONEY and a phony PR-cooked persona... but in the end, you’ll have to be the judge of that yourself.

Visible sings: ♫ Bush Family History Lesson ♫
'Bush Family History Lesson' is track no. 5 of 10 on Visible's 2002 album
'911 was an Inside Job'

Saddam and Me

Some of you know that Saddam Hussein and I communicate by mail and have done so even before his friends in the U.S. Defense Department turned on him because of his intended Petro-Euro conversion. Until that time American was happy to supply him with all of the technology needed to perform whatever atrocities he was supposed to have performed but which, I assure you, were totally in line with the standard activities expected of- make that required of- a Mid-East dictator.

Saddam never had the manufacturing infrastructure of the Israelis when is came to pounding their termite Palestinian population. By default Saddy (as he has asked me to call him) had to rely on external providers like us. Well, friends do fall out and never more so than when money is involved.

But I digress. Anyway, Saddam had sent me a copy of "Zabiba and the King" (his first novel). He liked the review I wrote and so, naturally, "The Fortified Castle", "Men and the City" and finally, "Be Gone Demons!" followed. This led to a sort of friendly intimacy that one might not expect between two men of different political outlooks, but our common literary aspirations eventually formed a bond.

Over the course of our communications we began to exchange poetry and I was quite struck by Saddy's sensitivity and blunt honesty in verse. Sometimes the full measure of the man is most clearly seen in his verse where, in combination with his muse he can most finely articulate the deeper portion of his essential nature.

Last year I posted some of Saddy's prison verse and I am of a mind to repost it now. Many new readers have come to the tiny little internet pond known as Smoking Mirrors. It is only fair that they should gain some insight into this man as he faces his long ordeal before the American Oil Tribunal.

As Saddy is led up four flights of stairs in four sets of shackles each day due to a busted elevator, let us peer into the mind of this complex soul whose true yearnings were always toward a greater expression of his more sensitive side. Unfortunately for him, as is the case with many of us, the duties of his material obligations have overshadowed his contributions to the world of art and academe.

Here are some selections from the poetry of Saddam Hussein. It is my hope that it will provide some insight into a part of Saddy that few of us have had the opportunity to view. As you can see, his mind is often occupied with that original cigar store Indian George W. Bush. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

First, some Haiku-

i met george w bush
at a satanic mixer
he blows me in Hell

Carlyle was my friend
until like Noriega
my world was downsized

I had the bush twins
not an entertaining ride
camels are much better


"I am waiting"

My country is gone
now it is a construction site
for the apocalypse
I should have taken the money but
I was proud

the Baghdad bootie bandits
ass rape my nation
pornography and liquor
pour into her streets

that's democracy for you
you can have it even if
you don't want it

I am now waiting for the first signs
to go up on billboards across the land
Allah's Fast Falafels-
a division of Burger King


"My People"

I knew my people were stupid
And I knew they were better off
I did not know that the American people were
even stupider than mine

they believe everything they are told
it does not matter how outrageous the lie
my people did not believe everything I told them
but they knew better than to say anything.

I had to routinely kill
so many every day
Love is good but fear is better

In America it is not necessary to kill anyone
What a nation of cowards
I have never before seen slaves who were
unaware of their station
and arrogant about it.

They will leave Iraq without the oil
they will leave bloody and ashamed
they will proclaim another victory
and give Palestine the blame.


"Pussy Boy George"

little georgie bush is my pussy boy
yes, we knew they would win the battle
just as we will win the war.

you cannot win a war waged by a pussy boy;
a pussy boy who was afraid to go to war
a pussy boy who hid and did drugs while others died
a pussy boy who was a cheerleader in college
he has no respect
he is a wooden Indian
he cannot hold Bill Clintons cigars

he is a tin horn dictator
I am a real dictator
I will see little georgie bush again
I will see him without his armies
without his money
I will see him in Hell and then
I will fuck him and I will pass him around

Hell will not be pretty for georgie bush
Hell is for hard men like me.


and he even wrote a Limerick...

There once was a psycho from Crawford
a really low rent Peter Lawford
he killed and he lied
and boy he was wide
he took every dime that was offered


Good luck Saddy. I know it isn't any comfort but even now, personalized scaffolds are being constructed on the Briatic plane for your former comrades in arms. You will be reunited in the hotlands where a new and more fiery passion will someday ignite you all into a more precise expression of what you should have been had you known better. I look forward to seeing you in good service and suplice on the grand day of your long return.

Visible sings: ♫ The Bush Family Manson ♫
'The Bush Family Manson' is track no. 7 of 10 on Visible's 2002 album
'911 was an Inside Job'
About this song (pops up)

Gang-Raping Pollyanna

Contrary to the howling, disclaiming mobs of neo-cons slathering like wharf rats near the guy lines of their sinking ship, the memo about bush’s statement concerning the bombing of Al Jazzera is true. That much is indisputable. What might be disputable is how real his intentions were. Taken in the context of the general madness of the boy king we can pretty much guarantee he was sincere. Taken in the context of Britain’s Official Secrets Act we can further guarantee it to be true. We don’t just have the smoke from the fire. We have the flames and the noxious smell of the fuel.

Galileo is long dead but we have the assurance that those who want to burn him at the stake still remain. The Sun, unmoved by this, continues to maintain the Earth in its orbit.

The more terrifying realities are not what bush has said and done so far at the behest of his handlers. They are not the recent findings concerning the Diebold polling software. They are not the hot raids into Syria and the US-British-Israeli car-bombings in Iraq, nor are they some piece of the thousands of bits of glaring evidence- or even all of the evidence taken in toto. The more terrifying realities are that this administration has 3 years to go and… what we haven’t seen in consideration of what they intend.

From the crushing legislations that, in all respects, deprive the poorest among us for the benefit of the richest, to the world wide disorder everywhere in evidence it is clear that no good can come from this fascist movement save for the great and universal joy that will be experienced upon their passing. And pass they will.

I cannot fathom what it is in the human psyche that permits so many people to believe the obvious lies. I do not understand how those who are being crushed in the machinery can so willingly support those who operate it. The myth of Al Qaeda is a bankrupt fairy tale. There’s no Bin Laden and there’s no Al Zawqawi. There are only outraged populations that resist criminal occupation. There was no Arab bombing of the World Trade Center. The sheer weight of the evidence is so great that the missing pieces are no longer important. The walking, talking duck is a duck and that’s all there is to it.

Perhaps one of the hardest features of compassion is to feel pity for those whose stupidity is beyond measurement. The recent mob actions in Texas and Florida (no surprise about the states involved) at various retail outlets speak volumes about the maturity of the American public. The free fall rate of dumbing down implies that some may go from two to four legs in the space of a single generation. It really is hard to believe. I rather suspect it isn’t Jesus who is coming for these people although a shepherd of some sort is altogether likely.

The hot pressing body of materialism; that’s got to be it- somehow the fascination with the objects of the sensory realm has lowered world IQ to the point that Howdy Doody is the new Da Vinci. Daily, the quality of everything is watered down. How far is down? It’s way, way down.

It brings up an interesting question. How will people who have become too wide to pass each other in a shopping aisle factor against the retailers need to provide maximum product in minimum space? How will such people manage to press and riot after goods when they can’t get through the aisles? Who are these people? Gerry Springer’s children have inherited the Earth.

Surely some of you who studied physics and related sciences must still remember some of what you learned. Some memory of the various theorems must still be lodged in the fatty portions of the brain’s pressboard. Extrapolating out in my own eccentric manner I must ask you; what is the cultural result of ‘stupid’ imploding? What happens when you become increasingly less well equipped to deal with ever more sophisticated requirements for existence? What happens when all of the sophisticated devices are manufactured for the purpose of entertainment and convenience alone? What is the factor of ipod volume to vehicle speed as it relates to your crossing the street for a Big Mac family pack?

If these people are having children what are they teaching them? What’s dinner like at that house? Where did Attila come from? It seems that in every time there has always been a barbarian horde of lean-muscled and hungry fighters forming in some wasteland far away from the splendored streets of Rome and… somehow they found their way there.

Oh, I believe it must be necessary. It must be necessary because it keeps happening and new cultures and civilizations continue to rise from the bloody froth of sacked cities and blasted landscapes. All of these barbarians aren’t massing in Mongolia or beneath the crust of the Earth. A great many of them are inside the gates of everywhere. While Pollyanna is listening to The Spice Girls and dreaming about Prince Benetton, a carload of ‘ain’t got nothing to lose’ boys are cruising up her street.

Nobody seems to see this. Nobody seems much to care. Somehow it’s still in the theater. It’s on a screen as life apart from life happening to somebody else. Where do you wind up if you follow someone who doesn’t know where they are going? What does it mean when the most prosperous nation on Earth needs more police than free fire zones? There’s math that handles these sorts of computations but people don’t seem moved to pursue or apply it.

If you take 90% of the people and you slowly crush them together to make space for the hi-life routines of 10% you can expect that a spontaneous encroachment is on the way. Some day the nut-jobs at the Wal-Mart are going to be climbing all over each other in new locations.

You get sick and you get better, or you get sick and then you die. It’s the same for a June-bug as it is for a person as it is for a nation. Police aren’t very effective facing in two directions at the same time. Where is the threat coming from? Who? What? Where?

Satisfaction is a state of mind. It isn’t a self-stocking feedbag. It’s like all the work that goes into getting to an orgasm; the rituals and meetings, the conversations and lies, the space station docking procedures and costs of environments and amenities and enhancements and then… spurt and then… what? You can’t design a culture around the schematic of a monkey with buttons for food and drugs. If the monkey doesn’t understand what’s going on; if the monkey thinks it can pull the avocado out of the clay pot with its fist it’s a dead monkey. If a handful of smarter, but still stupid monkeys are leading a nation of monkeys in the pursuit of monkey business then the results should be painfully clear to everyone but the monkeys. But that’s how monkey are and that’s what monkeys do.

You must first enslave yourself to become a slave; even if it is with the assistance of others already enslaved by whatever it was that convinced them you were meat. Pollyanna is gonna wake up in the alley in a stew of blood and semen and she is probably going to cry and ask herself, “Why me?” Don’t ask.

Visible sings: ♫ My Pickup Truck got Pregnant ♫
'My Pickup Truck got Pregnant' is track no. 1 of 10 on Visible's eponymous
'Les Visible' Music Album
Lyrics (pops up)

What You See Is Not What You Get.

There are various ways to fool people. One of them is to tell them what they want to hear. That sounds like a funny example doesn’t it? Yet people are fooled this way all the time, fooling themselves first. Then there is “the hand is quicker than the eye” which often includes misdirection to enhance the subterfuge. Another way people are fooled is in their natural inclination to believe authority. For instance, if some one asks me what my source is; why do I need a source? Do you ask the New York Times what their source is? Often, they are the source; being the paper of record means being the source sometimes, even if you are quoting unidentified sources or anonymous high ranking members of the administration. People are inclined to believe their leaders. It’s too scary to consider that they are lying to you. And why would they lie to you? That is the $64,000 question. You can get two toilet seats and a hammer for that.

People buy into lies for a lot of reasons; they are basically dishonest, they share in the profits, they are afraid, they are stupid, they are confused or they live in Alabama. People also believe if they just go along they will get along. Don’t make waves and maybe the boat will get to shore. You can lose your job if you open your mouth, that’s been happening a lot lately. You can go to jail and never get out. Never has the cost of telling the truth been so high. Never has it been so risky to stand up and be counted in the cross hairs.

Some time ago Guiliana Sgrena got kidnapped by alleged insurgents in Iraq. From what we know about so much of what goes on there, there is no telling who these insurgents were. We’ve got a lot of evidence these days in the form of phony Bin Laden videos, fake Al Qaeda cells in Palestine that are staffed by Mossad members.

Al Qaeda in Palestine

We’ve got camouflaged Brits posing as Arabs with carloads of explosives. We’ve got far more evidence of consistent lying, skullduggery and horrific abuse than we have of anything remotely resembling democracy in action. Italian national hero Nicola Calipari rescued her and then died in a hail of gun-bullets courtesy of American forces. Much has been said about what happened there and the preponderance of evidence clearly shows that it was a calculated assassination attempt. You see, Sgrena had proof of a massacre in Faluja; proof of the use of napalm and phosphorus, proof of wholesale slaughter, the strafing of Red Cross vehicles, proof of ugly, ugly things.

Now you’ve got the Italian film that shows what happened and takes us back to what happened with Sgrena, sort of like one and one is two; or is one and one still two? Beauty is only skin deep but white phosphorous burns all the way to the bone.

I don’t know that it matters in the minds of many American and UK people. They are all at a distance from this and what do they care? It’s just something they saw on TV. Tucker Carlson will explain it; if there ever was a cat that needed a few years in an ethnically mixed state prison it is Carlson. “You can leave your bow tie on. You can leave your bow tie on.”

Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, one ugly psychopathic stunt after another comes up in the windshield. Relentlessly, the neo-cons at work the world over are just cutting people and countries to pieces. So much evidence has been added up and added to that the camel, the camel’s back and everybody the camel knows and the landscape as far as the camel used to be able to see is buried under a mountain of straw.

In any system, be it natural or political or economic- balance is key to stability. Upset the balance of nature and you see what you get. Skewer the balance politically and either revolution or massacre will follow eventually. Tilt the economic balance to where a handful of Animal Farm characters own nearly everything and… suffering, want and death will follow and will begin to spread because, after all, when you want it all you can never have too much.

Yes, of course they used banned weapons of the sort that we went into Iraq to find but knew were not there so… what the Hell, let’s bring some of our own and use them on them; we’re all about irony here. Oh, and could you give me a couple of cartons of depleted Uranium too? Just put it on my bill.

So, unless you live under a rock; and I mean that in every sense, you know that these beasts in human form are being just as bad as they can be. You know they’ve got a dancing Halloween skeleton called Al Qaeda that goes into your living room window. You know that since the US has turned supreme in firepower its time for Imperial Rome again, only this time it's not the one in Italy.

What is it about nations and their citizens that once you get on top you naturally feel entitled to shit all over everybody else? Because, unless you live under a rock you can see what is happening. It is clear as daylight that you are either really, really stupid or really, really indifferent and, mind the bottom line.

I have asked people how they can believe as they do and I find their understanding of things and their access to a wider view is about as discerning as their taste in golf outfits. Unbelievably I have found that a lot of people really don’t care. It’s not happening down the street. It’s not happening in the living room except on the TV and all that is being explained. All through Vietnam the lies emerged and we now know what that was all about. Iran Contra, we know what that was about. Iraq, we know what that is about.

I haven’t been in the US for awhile. I don’t fare well there given my capacity to see and feel and comment on it. I hear its really grim now, or so my friends tell me. Yet, I find it hard to believe that most Americans support this. Do you really think this won’t come back on you some day? Are you so incurious or stupid that you actually think the WTC buildings came down at the speed they did right into their own footprints? Has it become impossible to organize at all? And what happened to the opposition? How did everybody in Congress turn into a yellow-tailed flounder?

I see it happening every day. I watch the course of the world as it turns. I wonder about Sgrena and the shooting and the real reasons behind the French riots and how France and America have been getting along. I study all of the incidences of Americans and others masquerading as something else while perpetrating the acts they accuse the people they are killing of perpetrating. I see this trend of constant lies and violence and misrepresentation. I see it every day. And I see the sad, thick, obese, cotton candy minds of the addicts junked out on a poisonous cartoon culture and I think… Let me see how far back I can sit while this goes down. I’d do most anything to help but I’m no longer sure what that might be. I have been concerned with what I see on the horizon for the human race, yet some portion of them seems eager for it. It’s just another kick on the way. Maybe it’s a new thrill?

Imperial Rome went away and you can see how and why. It is amazing how much this culture presently mirrors it in decline. Sometimes all you can do is get on your water buffalo and ride out through the gates in the Great Wall of China. I’ve a lot of respect for the man who did that. Sometimes there just isn’t anymore to say when so many people just don’t seem to care.

You hear a lot these days about this so-called Asian Bird flu. Believe me, that’s the least of your concerns. You’ve got several other viruses far more deadly; the virus of ignorance and indifference will kill you while you are still walking around. How deep into your own flesh do you have to go before you just don’t see or hear anymore? Measure where you are now and tell me how deep is that?

"9/11 Dreaming in a World of Flesh"

flesh

in a world of flesh

sees flesh only

the heart and the mind may suspect
but still too often
see
flesh only

back of the flesh in the world of gears
manipulated triggers pull at the limbs
that dance in the world of flesh

orchestration
and the high art of fraud
are an easy task
in the world of flesh

and the tumbling bodies hit
and the dust rolls in clouds from the streets
but another dust comes
from the smoke machines
and the mirror exchange of the press

some say the Arabs were angry that day
some say there's more to the ruse
beneath the veils are a number of things
that
SOMEONE
has put to good use

other intentions have come through the fire
and now they would burn the world

the convenient timing

the fabulous deaths

the great down winding
diminished regrets

in the unseeing world of flesh

now comes
the junk and the tedious songs
on and on
ad nauseum

the Twin Towers Watch
the speeches and banners

"on Comet and Cupid"

and Tiny Dancer

the peacocks are fanning

the demagogues struttin'

the survivors are jostlin'

through cables and grips

very important envelopes of flesh will
inflate their gills
with the shimmering scales of eminence

and gravitas

and their importance as flesh

and

remind
you
of
that

and... remind you... of that


it goes on forever

it lasts for an age

and-
….. THERE'S NO MORE FUCKING ROOM ON THE STAGE!

for the flesh

that encompasses space in a world of flesh

forget Rwanda,
Sierra Leone

the Congo?

where that's at?

I lost my cell phone

where's my goddamn latte?

is this lettuce fresh?

it's so hard for me
in this world of flesh

no one understands what it's like
for ME!

no one understands!

I don't understand

"why can't we all just get along?"

in the world of flesh

in the world of flesh

flesh expands and presses out over the clothing
and all restraint

flesh billows with the fruit of appetite

the soft melting encapsulated lard
of chewy TV goodies

and somebody

somebody...

blew up the church of the flesh

the goalposts of the empire of flesh
came down

the towers of flesh motivating upwards

the upwardly mobile flesh

flesh...

the lightening struck tower

somebody....

somebody....

now walk with me...
take a walk with me…

behind the world of flesh

back into the gears

back behind the tech's

behind the bankers

behind the money

behind the images

behind the ideas

behind the numbers

and behind the initial divide

far from the world of flesh you have

the uninvited guest

the forgotten lover

the fruit of desirous quest

someone forgot

SOMEONE FORGOT!

a lot of fragmented flesh puppets forgot

a whole lot of somebody
seriously forgot

to invite God into the world of flesh

and God showed up anyway

like the sword

as the spirit-
informing matter of it's presence

but it will never do to look for truth in the rubble

it will never do to think in terms
that flesh cannot accept

it will never do to consider
the absolute precision of the act

the fluid grace

that caught everyone flat footed
with a stupid look on their face

things can only be a certain way in the world of flesh

the impermanent flesh demands it

the vanishing melting vulnerable flesh is trumpeting

and cannot hear beyond it's own noise

the flesh is God unto itself

in the land of stuff

where stuff is God

there is never enough
there is NEVER enough...

just the wanting of the flesh
in a landscape of desired things

the temporary paradise on disappearing wings

rage on flesh

RAGE ON!

wrap yourself in the colored images of dream

wrap yourself in the vain exhortation

wrap yourself in the clamoring

clanging detuned symbols
of the empire of flesh

scream
and laugh

and weep
and carry on

it is never a moment too soon
in a world that is too soon gone

one should never disturb the dangerous dreams
of the lords of the kingdoms of flesh

the heart and the mind may suspect

but they can't get there yet

the tiny voice in the silence may speak

but cannot be heard

not in the world of flesh

sometimes a greater noise is needed

from the lover you have forgotten

the lover
who
has not forgotten
you…

I know you're in there….

[BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!!!]

“I KNOW YOU"RE IN THERE!!!!!!”

[BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!!!]

“I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE!!!!!!!”

I know you're in there...

hidden in a world of flesh.

Buried in a world of flesh

Hiatus

I had to go away for a week and now I am going away again, this time for about a month. I won't have internet in the home I am renting and I don't know what will be available in the area. I suspect there should be an internet cafe somewhere around and if that is the case I can prepare my essays and then just drop in and post them when I'm in town.

I want to thank all of you who have been reading here and at the other location and especially for your support via the comments section and in emails. I haven't been able to get by some of your blogs as I usually like to do. Generally I don't respond in the comments section so, once again I will mention that emails are the way to get reciprocal communications out of me.

Blessings and good fortune all around. I'll try to get something up the beginning of next week.

Les Visible

Visible sings: ♫ Fade Away ♫
'Fade Away' is track no. 3 of 10 on Visible's 2006 album 'Songwriter'
Lyrics (pops up)

History is Bunk

So says Henry Ford or, should I say, so ‘said’ Henry Ford. As far as entrepreneurs who turned into financial titans Ford was no better nor worse a human being than the rest. When seeking to find why Ford was the way he was it is always good to look at what happened to him too.

My take on why Henry said what he said is based on his appreciation of the journalism of the day. Journalism hasn’t changed much and a lot of what we know as journalism accounts for what we know of history; the record of the day. Henry saw the lies of his time manifest daily at his breakfast table.

I’m not going to get into morality issues here. I am not so callow as to miss the hard choices and necessities of judgment on the part of people with a whole lot of money. I know how money works at a basic level; often independent of the humanity or lack of it in any possessing it. For me money is a means to an end and I only want enough to achieve my ends which are almost exclusively based on the desire for privacy and potential for movement; other needs are secondary and should be assumed as a matter of course in the lives of any one of us.

Today’s journalism is more yellow than my short-haired St. Bernard, ‘Poncho’ could have made it after snarfling down a couple of quarts of Ballantine Ale that I might have poured into his dish.

Where I depart from the methods of conclusion practiced by many here is that I ‘try’ to carefully read and analyze what is being presented. I ask myself, “Why are they saying this?” I try to look at the other hand when the principal hand is in motion. The hand is quicker than the eye.

Most people have a basic faith in what they hear through official sources. I often hear the disclaimer, “Why would they lie?” on the matter of 9/11 one hears, “Oh come on, it would take hundreds of people to be involved in something like that. Someone would have said something.” Au contraire; it took only those involved in passing the hi-jackers through the gates. After that we don’t know what happened on the planes. The black boxes just aren’t there. As for the follow-ups and scrambled jets we know they were ordered to stand down via Cheney and we know that the writ to empower who and when had been adjusted just a few short months previous. In fact all sorts of uncanny activity went on about this both before and after.

If one cared to know one only has to go HERE and there is a vast and comprehensive selection of resources in the sidebar to the left. If one doesn’t care to know one voids the right to an opinion except to operate as a strolling companion for the man wearing the “I’m with Stupid.” T-shirt.

To give an opportunity for the pariah dogs under the porch to howl I should point out that the same Israeli security firm was in charge of ‘all’ 9/11 affected airports, the Madrid train station and the London tube at the time of the attacks. That Israeli security firm is ICTS. You’ll be heartened to know that an Israeli security firm is now in charge of security at America’s nuclear facilities. Magal Security Systems is now guarding nuclear facilities and weapons storage sites. Look it up. I’m not going to do your research for you. If you add in the activities of Odigo software and other proprietary systems and factor them in with ongoing information thefts you get quite a haul; mere coincidence of course. And when you add it to all the other coincidences, well, mere coincidence of course.

I’m including here a link to a bit torrent site where you can download the 4 part Fox News (yes, that’s right, Fox News) report on Odigo and other hanky panky expeditions. This report was removed from the Fox web site immediately after it was given and they have been after the free distribution of it non-stop. Good luck guys.

Here’s the link for the report.

HERE

You’ll need Bit Torrent to download this. You can get it all over the net. I see where I am one of only ‘two seeds’ still offering the thing. Better hurry if you care. Of course I could email it to any account that will accept a little over 50MB’s but I’m only going to do this a few times.

Someone took exception to my calling Bush a criminal. Administration policies toward those detained at Abu Graib and Gitmo tell all one needs to know about global law-breaking. And I could go on and on. Yesterday the Senate gave the stormtroopers in the White House a black eye when they voted 90 to 9 not to allow the procedures that were in place to continue. The White House objects to this. It’s all about making you safe people. Yes, one of these days you are going to be really, really safe. Just wait. Waiting and head-ducking have real historical precedent; being as we are talking about history and our perception of it. Maybe you have heard the phrase, “History is written by the victors.”?

Have you seen the things I have mentioned anywhere in your mainstream news? Take some time to ponder the links at whatreallyhappened.com- Look at the sheer weight of contradictory evidence and ask yourself this- Why are there so many contradictions? When you see the size of the holes in the official story; large enough to drive a fleet of trucks through you have to assume they are lying. Why are they lying? Cui bono.

Dismissing me as a crank is pointless without a supporting argument. No one here or elsewhere has yet taken the time to point by point refute my arguments. The reason is they can’t. Can you? Go therefore and do so. Take the time not to appear as an uniformed dog barking at what it can’t see and hasn’t looked at. First of all it makes you look bad and second of all it doesn’t impress me. I’m after the truth at whatever cost. I don’t give a hang about reputation and I don’t give a hang about slander and imprecation. Prove me wrong and I will be grateful, very grateful.

It begs the question of why I would address this issue at all. What’s in it for me? I already know enough to come to various conclusions and there’s no financial reward, or otherwise, in my pointing these things out. Where’s my end? My needs are covered and I live apart from the scurrying about for survival that hallmarks the lives of most. I am free to come and go where and how I will. My issue is to defend against the impact of lies on the behavior of the populace. I want the greatest good for the most people and that can’t happen when the few manipulate circumstances for their exclusive benefit.

What I really want you to do is ask questions and weigh evidence. Wonder and inquire. When you do this you add to the overall awareness of an informed public. I have not included 1% of the information I possess. You can get a good idea of what it is at the web site I keep mentioning. When you join the few, the brave, the aware who seek to be objective you become a force for disclosure. Many of you don’t care. I understand that. Self interest runs your life. Unfortunately for you it doesn’t run as strong as it does in the lives and actions of those deceiving you and you don’t have anything like their temporal force.

Is it or isn’t it? Seek or remain force-fed. History is bunk but everything leaves a trail.

Visible sings: ♫ And We Could All Be Free ♫
'And We Could All Be Free' is track no. 8 of 10 on Visible's 2006 album 'Songwriter'
Lyrics (pops up)

Nothing New Under the Sun

More and more I am coming to see that it is a great foolishness on my part to imagine that anything I say or do will influence the world in its present course. It goes without saying that it is, no doubt foolishness at any time to imagine such a thing. I imagine no real poet ever penned a line with the marketplace in mind. Thoughts of glory and lasting remembrance may have intruded after the coitus but I suspect the muse has many suitors and knows the intimate heart of every one.

With enough money I could buy the attention of most anyone for a time. But not all the money in the world is enough to attract the attention of the one who wears the stars of heaven in her hair. I know that I have been guided and comforted and protected by the thoughts and words of those who have passed before me. I have been taught that my life is a small thing and best spent on that which is of greater importance; ideas, dreams in gestation, love- both romantic and that empowered with a wider grasp. Romantic love is not a bad start though it often ends badly; the furnace is not cost effective.

One more book within a Niagara of words cannot count for much unless its point precedes words and indicates what does precede words. Words, like clothes are designed with the body they conceal in mind. They may conceal it entirely or they may reveal everything but mystery. Since mystery remains, even in view of full nakedness, the draper’s art is a mighty one.

The hardest thing I am learning is that passionate thought alone will not give redress to the human condition. I’ve seen races come out of centuries of abuse, with eloquent speeches and visible change, into the hope of a new freedom only to be re-enslaved by a different means. I have seen races come out of great tragedy and oppression only to become as vicious as their former oppressors ever were. I have seen the tables turn over and over to find that the same people are still sitting there.

The stirring phrases of great orators and illustrators of the human condition continue to sound in the air around us to no evident avail; “business as usual” and “What have you done for me lately.” With all of the lessons of history at our fingertips the same lies are sung across the world as if they were the anthems and hymns of our essential nature; perhaps they are. There is an argument that human nature is basically corrupt, despite the occasional exceptions in every land and time.

The glaring lesson of Vietnam has no impact on the moment. Its now the playground of revisionists. “If only we had stayed the course we could have had peace with honor.” Ideas of universal brotherhood; the great legacies of inspired art and the clear transcendent teachings of illuminated souls do not disturb the appetites of the common herd. The shepherds are demagogues with an advertising budget. The intensifying press of bodies in vast cathedrals of junk raise their voices in hallelujahs to the new and improved.

Millions of lives are lived in poisoned boxes pressed closer and closer and higher and higher. Millions of cars and lorries steam back and forth on highways to nowhere. There is some end in sight but what it is no one can tell. The thin veneer of civilization can be stripped away in an hour. It only waits for the right provocation. No one has taught them anything deeper than looking out for number one. The peoples of the world are dancing in a fire trap with the exit doors locked. The fire marshals are counting their take. The bouncers are scanning the crowd. The alcohol commissioners are guarding against the influx of competitive product; especially anything eye-opening or non-guilt inducing.

With clear knowledge of the consequences the daily bread is beaten to death and leached of all nutrition. Only the poor have the luxury of a good diet if they had the sense to buy it, if they had the means.

More people, more disease, more profits for the mill; in smaller locations the privileged few live in the example of what is possible for you. The lottery winks, the tables call; risk everything and win it all.

I am seeing more clearly now that it is just an eternal process. Sometimes it is in a renaissance and sometimes it is in free fall. The soundtrack usually indicates the plot line. So what does a person do? As many options as there appear to be there are really only a few. You get yours. You help others get theirs. You are employed in whatever system is preeminent. You work to alter the system. You work to destroy the system. You live outside the system. You live inside the system. You think. You do not think. You feel. You do not feel.

As I have considered all of the possibilities for myself and as I have weighed them against one another I have concluded that it has very little to do with ‘here’ as long as ‘here’ is given to mean ‘there’; ‘now’ has value only as it is applied to ‘then’. It’s all about ‘later’ and ‘when’ and ‘if’.

Screaming at Bush and railing against injustice seems to have no effect. If he could have heard you, if he were inclined to listen, he would have heard you long ago. That model wasn’t designed with ears to hear or eyes to see; nor are any of the other C-432B replicants and spin-offs that operate in their spheres of influence the world over. Take the money and run or run from the money? Live large or live small; ...the seesaw baby.

So sometimes it’s bad and sometimes it’s good; screen goddess in the first act and crack whore in the next. In this theater it’s always going to get better and it’s always going to get worse. It really does look like the thing is to get out of the theater; through the locked exit doors before the eventual fire and the newspaper headlines of the newspaper that needs the fire for the people who want some vicarious satisfaction, basking in the glow, in the rubbernecking crowd that got to be a bystander only because it was waiting in line and still waiting in line to be listed in the next headline; coming to a theater soon.

Although I know that there are other worlds where the sun is a tipped jar of honey, I begin to see that it only retards my progress to rail against the irreversible process of recycling personas forever inclined to the hot-blooded confusion of appetites in the buffet line. As long as it tastes good to you, who am I to argue? The whole point of the masquerade is about catching on. Some are meant to guide and we who can hear are improved by their witness. Some are meant to slip away on their own; maybe compassion or debt prevails upon them to return at a later date. For some reason some do come back again and again. I’ve heard them and their message is more powerful to me than the shine on the glass and the shimmer on the ass. The good news is that not all of the exits are locked. It’s just a matter of braving the dark for a short period of time. That’s not such an ordeal when you have been living in darkness all along.

The empire of the flesh is eternal in its place. The engines of the flesh will power on until the last morsel has been savored and consumed and no doubt beyond that. It is here that longing is refined and the aperture appears. Afterwards it dissolves into a sea of milk to contemplate beginning all over again. What a wonder.

Visible sings: ♫ And We Could All Be Free ♫
'And We Could All Be Free' is track no. 8 of 10 on Visible's 2006 album 'Songwriter'
Lyrics (pops up)

A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall...............

“And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard and it’s a hard, it’s a hard rain gonna fall.”

Halle-freaking-fallujah! Well, it looks like Mr. (political) Death’s going to be able to tell us how much he likes our blue-eyed boy; Tom-Tom (Drums of Moria) Delay. The Witch-King of Angmar is headed south. Mr. Earle, your friends may not call you ‘Speedo’ but ‘comprehensive’ will do, oh yes indeedy.....oh yes indeedy do.

What did it take friends and neighbor? Oh to have been a fly on the wall. Can you imagine what it took for a D.A. in Texas; in Texas!!! to come through with this? Kudos Mr. Earle!!!

And presently comes the redoubtable Patrick Fitzgerald; careful, cautious, ‘ducks in a row’, relentless, minutiae crunching, soon-to-be man of the hour. Did Hollywood handle this? Who’s scripting the time line to bring all these goodies to the table at the dinner hour, piping hot und mit untrueglichem urteil! Is the Plame Affair a Ludlum redux? And.........

What is this; Bill Frist stutter-stepping round the cowpies stinking on the Capitol steps? Yahooooooooooo! It’s a Newt Gingrich turnaround of the first order!

When you indict a member of Congress you can’t just waltz in with circumstantial. You can’t just have a little proof. You have to have ten times the proof needed for the lumpen proles. And so they must do. And so they must have. Oh, they may not get Frist but, then again, ‘once’ they’ve nailed Delay to the barn door and once they’ve nailed ‘pigboy’ Rove up along side him, the perception of possibility becomes more pronounced and.....sail on you bright beautiful justice system; all but dead in the water after Florida 2000. Am I schadenfreudial here? You bet I am.

The degree of injustice, rank venality and ‘in-your-face’ hubris of this administration is coming home to roost. It’s winking like Las Vegas neon overhead with one of those arrows flashing and flowing downward, pointing at the top of the heads of the stolen nation. Everything is now in alto relievo.

Step by step, inch by inch......oh yeah.....all the lies; all the shared international anguish, all the blasted bodies, bombs bursting in air collected together in a damning collage held together by blood and shit that you don’t see in this quantity outside of a 70’s era bathhouse. Am I hard, hard as the rain? Am I lacking in compassion and understanding of the tough choices of government? Am I missing the beam in my own eye? You’d need an eye the size of Katrina’s to contain the beam in this administration’s sclera.

I feel prophetic in my description of the dike of shit-bricks in my last essay. Who would have thought it? They skated so long, with nary a wrinkle they couldn’t sail around or sail over. Now it seems that it’s coming from all directions; what a fantastic orchestration. What a crowd of dovetails and the housing bubble due to burst any day. I am in awe of this, this divine process. I must call it divine. There is too much serendipity here. Halle-freaking-fallujah!

People, I don’t want to be a raging inferno. I don’t want to be Savonarola with my words and phrases dressed up like the pope at The Hookers Ball. I don’t like flaming across the page, half righteous indignation and half storming the Bastille; like I don’t have a chorus line of skeletons in my own closet. I want to sit by the ocean and watch the timeless process of the waters fluid ease. I want to sun bathe on the rocks of time and skinny-dip in the pools of infinity. I want to dance with the goddess in the empty desert under countless radiant stars. I don’t want to be elbow deep in guts and offal.

Now, as I watch it all come together; minus the "I told you so."; long overdue- darkest before dawn- but coming... I am in wondrous awe at that mysterious justice that grinds so exceedingly small.

Tom Delay is finished, stick a fork in him. There is no President Frist in your future and Karl Rove and the whole Cheney; dirty-tricks, family tree is on its way to the pulp mill. What are these people saying to each other right now? What are they thinking? God this is Shakespearean. Now comes the ugly feasting. Now come the whores who mulched the news and served it up each day. Now we will watch them turn on their masters. You got to watch the bottom line. It’s a safe harbor in the king’s harem when the king is unchallenged; except for the sex of course but these people swallowed their distaste along with all of the rest of it a long time ago.

The most disgusting crack-whores in the whole tawdry affair are the democrats. They will never have my support again...except; damn you Les you beaten dog wagging your tail again. Even now they dance at the edge of the margins; school yard sissies with their nuts retracted into the abdominal cavity. Let’s not forget the democrats when we get to the buffet table. Let us hold them in every bit as much scorn as we do the republicans. Let’s not forget Ms. Fence Straddler Clinton and Mr. No-See-um Kerry. God, doesn’t Al Gore look good now? I ALWAYS liked Al Gore. It’s too damn bad he’s a democrat.

People... all of you, let’s get it together; republicans, democrats, independents. Let’s open our eyes! Let’s find our common brotherhood and ‘seal the door where evil dwells’. I have raged against America. I have scorned this materialistic society of cavalier consumers; you latte drinking. People Magazine reading, Oprah-watching, right wing radio listening pack of callous fools but... I am a beaten dog. I love you and I am chained to my love. I can’t abandon you no matter how hard I try. You are my brothers and sisters. You are my family. Please wake up. Please wake up and put out the fire and rebuild the house.

I weep for you. I stand here shouting and waving and being a general pain-in-the-ass and just wishing you’d let me in. I only want to stand by the door and guard. I don’t want to be paid or admired. I want to admire. I want to be proud in that non-bombastic flag-waving way that is part and portion of the natural appreciation of the angels of our better nature when we honestly strive to make them shine. I just wish you weren’t so goddamn selfish and blind. It’s not too late. We can collectively stand and say we are sorry. We can be better than we are. We can have real heroes, not scumbags. We could....... We could.

I don’t hate these people. I just don’t understand them. I don’t understand hurting other people because I am so fucking selfish that I think it is okay to hog the world’s resources and pollute the landscape and kill without reason or remorse in lands abroad. We talk a lot about our generosity. We presume upon the idea of some imagined greatness. We posture and prance when we should bow our heads for real instead of genuflecting like whitened sepulchers for the poor rewards of an audience who is as fickle as their gratitude from the last kickback. We act, we pretend. We take the Pat Tillman within us and we shame and then murder him.

If we can’t be honest with ourselves we can hardly expect that we will be honest with others; especially when we make a virtue out of thieving and lying. We’re better than this. We are better than the poor examples screaming from the headlines. We are better than the arm-twisting bullies that we have become. Don’t let the hard work of generations be lost in such ignoble behavior. Try harder and offer more. What goes around comes around.

Visible and The Critical List: ♫ Shallow Graves ♫
'Shallow Graves' is track no. 3 of 7 on Visible and The Critical List's 1987 album
'The Pope of Rock and Roll'
About this song (pops up)