Contemplating the upcoming trip to Austin has me thinking about the Native Americans and how I have always drawn such inspiration from them. They make frequent appearances in my art both for their beauty and for their symbolic power. They mean many things to me but to boil it down I would say they represent the natural human, living in harmony with the environment, and, more regrettably, man’s inhumanity to man.
NOTE: All but the last two videos in this diary are YouTube finds. The final two are compilations of my own (please forgive the poor quality – I’m still learning), and the last one features some prominent kossacks from last year’s Yearly Kos in Chicago.
It is all too easy to idealize an age, especially if sufficient time has passed to blunt the pain and obscure the harsh realities of the day. It is too tempting to look back in longing for a past that never really existed. We all seem to have a tendency to do this - ah the good old days we say.
"Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory."
Franklin Pierce Adams
"Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was."
The likely outcome of the Bush-led Republican raid on America astonishes me. As America’s national nightmare approaches the eight-year mark, the Bush administration is apparently going to escape unpunished. They are going to skate scot-free. They have brazenly committed major crimes against the people of the United States, not to mention the terrible things they have done to much of the rest of the world...and these bastards are going to skate scot-free.
For 40 years I have been told be patient, work within the system, elect more Democrats. In all that time I have seen few victories and most of those merely symbolic (ooh, they increased the minimum rage by 15 cents an hour), and these anemic victories have been overwhelmed by the horrendous losses the American people have suffered time and time again. There has been a steady erosion of our Constitutional rights, economic inequality has increased, the working poor and the middleclass have been robbed at every turn by the filthy rich and our government has become more corrupt, more warlike and more evil. We now openly torture our prisoners and publicly argue that it is our right to do so.
We are at a time unlike any other in the 250,000-year history of our species. What we do now will determine the fate of our kind. We may soon know whether or not we deserve the name we have given ourselves, homo sapiens sapiens – wise or knowing human.
"Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason."
My father was a soldier and a drill instructor who trained briefly with a Japanese jujitsu master during WWII in preparation for teaching hand-to-hand combat to Army GIs. He taught my two brothers and me some basic techniques so that we might have an edge in dealing with schoolyard bullies – and the training stood me in good stead. I used what he taught me on more than one occasion to inject a little homegrown justice into an unpleasant situation. Those experiences left me with two lasting gifts, an antipathy for bullies and a love for the martial arts.
I began formal training in Judo at age eleven on the Army base at Ft. Benning, Georgia where I trained for a year. I continued my training in Paris and for a brief time competed on the French National Judo Team as a brown belt (sankyu).
‘Support the Troops.’ I have come to have mixed feelings about that phrase. I have been both amused and appalled by the Democrats’ terror at being accused of not supporting the troops. How did our politics become so simplistic and artificial? How did it become all about appearances, and never mind the substance?
I came of age in the time of Nixon and Vietnam. I learned then that our government was not to be trusted, that they lie to us whenever it’s convenient and that there is nothing pure about their motives. I also learned to suspect that elements of our government played an active role in the assassination of John Kennedy and possibly others. I’m not saying they did, just that I’ve pondered that possibility for most of my life and not without reason. I still have to wonder. The possibility that our government is that fucking evil shouldn’t seem like such a stretch to anybody these days.
In looking back at the Bush debacle, one thing stands out. It would never have happened, at least not so blatantly and egregiously, had there been a healthy opposition party in America. Up until 2000 there was at least the illusion of the Democrats as a party in opposition to the Republicans, however ineffective. And the Republicans, though always venal, have never been so nakedly predatory, never so in-your-face ‘I’m going to take your shit and you’re going to like it’, never so openly disdainful of the Constitution and the law. Somewhere along the line, the notion of the Democrats as the voice of sanity counter-balancing Republican lunacy has become just so much political vaporware. What happened?
Must be a sign of the apocalypse. The MSM catches up to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, a former senior official in the US Department of Commerce, who wrote The Three Trillion Dollar War.
Through my blogging I’ve become aquainted with quite a few interesting folks, among them is my good friend Elliot Anderson, Marine Veteran of Afghanistan and well-known Democratic activist from Nevada who also chairs the Nevada Democratic Veterans & Military Families Caucus.
Let’s Impeach the President for Lying
And misleading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door
Neil Young
On Monday of this week Rep. Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 articles of impeachment. On Wednesday it finally was acknowledged by CNN. In fact it was, for a time, the third most popular story right after Incest girl reunited with family and 'Idol' runner-up lands record deal.
This diary is a tribute to the power of the individual and is dedicated to two particular individuals who, as they say, require no introduction, kid oakland and Land of Enchantment. I would never have had the pleasure of meeting my dear friend Land of Enchantment at YKOS last year had it not been for the scholarship program started by Kid Oakland. This diary is in support of that program.
In this age of great and persistent evil it is easy to become overwhelmed by the never-ending cascade of horror and madness that the daily news has become. How does one stand against the tide of violent hatred, willful ignorance and blind running greed when its onrush is so powerful, its influence so ubiquitous, its effects so devastating? What in the world can one person do?
A hearty and sincere congratulations to Barack Obama and all of his supporters. The only other thing I have to say about that is to ask you to please reach out to our brothers and sisters in the HRC camp, many of whom have been abused in this process. We are all Democrats, we are all progressives, and we all have a lot of work to do in fixing our sadly and badly broken country.
With all due respect to those who serve in the armed forces, we owe it to them to ask hard questions about the sacrifices demanded of them and their families.
It’s fine and good and perfectly appropriate for us to honor our dead, but if we allow ourselves to be whipped into a patriotic frenzy every time some yahoo waves a flag it can serve to legitimize the military enterprise – and that is the point I wish to make. The military enterprise is not legitimate.
