Hua hu Ching, Chapter 3
Those
who wish to
embody the Tao
should embrace all things.
To embrace all things means first
that one holds no anger or resistance
toward any idea or thing, living or
dead, formed or formless.
Acceptance is the very
essence of the
Tao.
To embrace
all things means also that
one rids oneself of any concept of separation;
male and female, self and other, life and
death. Division is contrary
to the nature of
the Tao.
Foregoing
antagonism and separation,
one enters into the harmonious
oneness of all things.
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May 3rd, 2012 » Comments »
Read it and weep: “The Constitutional Crimes of Barack Obama”
As we slog towards another vapid, largely meaningless exercise in pretend democracy with the selection of a new president and Congress this November, it is time to make it clear that the current president, elected four years ago by so many people with such inflated expectations four years ago (myself included, as I had hoped, vainly it turned out, that those who elected him would then press him to act in progressive ways), is not only a betrayer of those hopes, but is a serial violator of his oath of office. He is, in truth, a war criminal easily the equal of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and perhaps even of Bush’s regent, former Vice President Dick Cheney. Let me count the ways:
For starters, in vowing to “preserve, protect and defend the US Constitution of the United States,” President Obama, upon taking office, had a sacred obligation to prosecute the people who had gravely wounded that document prior to his assuming office. It was clear, as I wrote in my book The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office, that Bush and Cheney had ordered and condoned and covered up torture of captives in their so-called “War” on Terror, as well as in the very real wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, committing grievous war crimes that are not only violations of international law, but of the US Criminal Code, given that the US is a leading author and signatory of the Geneva Accords). They also were war criminals of the first degree for orchestrating, through lies to both the UN Security Council and the US Congress and the American people, about the alleged threat and imminence of any threat by Iraq to the US or its allies. President Obama, under the UN Charter and under US law, as the president, commander in chief and top law officer in the nation, was bound to investigate and prosecute those crimes. Instead, he ordered that there would be no prosecutions.
A federal court also ruled that President Bush had committed a felony in using the National Security Agency and several complicit telecommunications companies to spy on massive numbers of Americans with no warrants. Again, instead of prosecuting the president once he replaced him, President Obama said there would be no prosecution, and he went on to expand that spying program exponentially, effectively shredding beyond recognition the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures, which had been a leading rallying issue for the revolutionists of 1776.
President Obama, on his own initiative, has moved beyond the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, launching illegal wars against Libya, Yemen and Pakistan, largely through the use of American military aircraft, cruise missiles and especially pilotless drones. In addition to being illegal acts of war against nations that pose no imminent threat to the US, these clear acts of war have caused vastly disproportionate civilian deaths — reportedly as many as 40 civilians, including many children, are being killed by drone strikes inside Pakistan for each of the supposed targeted “terrorists.” Jist the disproportionality of such “collateral damage” is a heinous war crime, even leaving aside the illegality of such strikes being conducted by the US within the border of a sovereign nation not at war with the US.
The president and his surrogates, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have committed one of the gravest of crimes in the world, a Crime Against Peace under the UN Charter (which as a signed and Senate-ratified treaty is the law of the land under our Constitution), by threatening a war of aggression against the nation of Iran. Under the Charter’s terms, it is the number one war crime to attack a nation that does not pose an imminent threat to the attacker, and a nearly equally grievous crime to threaten such a crime, as the president and his secretary of state have done on multiple occasions, warning Iran that “all options are on the table” should Iran not halt its (totally legal) nuclear fuel enrichment program. Beyond just words, the President as Commander in Chief has moved several fully armed, Tomahawk Cruise-missile-equipped aircraft battle groups to positions off the coast of Iran, sent squadrons of new F22 stealth fighter bombers to airfields directly across the Persian Gulf from Iran, and positioned troops and missile-equipped submarines in invasion-ready locations, as well as providing specialized bombs and refueling aerial tankers to Israel, which itself is preparing for an attack on Iran. Yet even the most hawkish Israeli and US military and intelligence experts concede that Iran is years away from having an operational nuclear weapon even if it were to begin a bomb-development program, which there is no evidence of at present. Obama has already ordered an ongoing campaign of terrorist attacks and bombings inside of Iran, which has led to the deaths of many Iranians, including civilians.
President George W. Bush committed an impeachable crime when he had Jose Padilla, an American citizen born in New York, arrested, held without charge on a military base in South Carolina a for years and tortured mercilessly to the point of madness, before he was finally ordered released to a civilian prison where he faced trial in a civilian court. But President Obama has moved well beyond that travesty by issuing, in April 2010, and then acting on an Executive Order that he claims allows him, on his sole authority, to declare American citizens to be “terrorists” and to have them killed anywhere in the world. Under this clearly unconstitutional order, there is no trial, no judicial ruling. Just an execution order. At least two citizens have been killed in this way, including the wholly innocent young son of an American-born target, Anwar al-Awlaki, killed by a Predator drone in Yemen. President Obama has also, short of killing them, signed an order authorizing the arrest and secret detention indefinitely of American citizens, again on his own authority, without trial or legal recourse. He has also continued to claim the right to rendition and to torture captives that he on his own authority declares to be terrorists.
President Obama, as president, is responsible for a program organized out of his Department of Homeland Security last year, to coordinate and help finance a nationwide violent crackdown on the Occupy Movement which swept the country in a wave of popular anger at the crimes of the US financial industry and the massive corruption of the political process. Hundreds if not thousands of people who were peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights to assemble, speak and seek redress were battered, shot, gassed, pepper-sprayed, beaten, arrested and jailed by local, state and sometimes federal police urged on by the central government’s internal security agencies. Participants in these legitimate protests have been photographed, investigated, spied on, subjected to the deceits of agents provocateur, and now are in data bases in federal, state and local computer systems, where they are classified as national security threats, making a mockery of the claim that America is still a free, democratic society.
As a special category of crime, this repression, orchestrated by the White House through its Homeland Security (sic) and Justice (sic) Departments, targeted the press, with clearly identified reporters, even including those from major corporate news organizations, being subjected to arrest, having their cameras snatched or destroyed, or at a minimum being forcibly removed from the scene of repressive police actions against demonstrators.
The president, initially lying to the American public about the goals of the raid, ordered the slaying –not the capture — of Osama Bin Laden, the alleged mastermind behind the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon in 2001, thus continuing the cover-up of the truth about that event which precipitated the current crisis of American democracy. With Bin Laden located and easily trapped within his compound in Pakistan, the president sent a US Navy Seal team in under cloak of night with the express goal of killing Bin Laden, thereby assuring that he would never be interrogated or put on the stand where he could potentially have revealed what really happened on 9-11, who knew about the plans, and how he was able to pull off such an improbable attack on the most powerful nation in the history of the world.
Corruption: There is so much corruption in this administration that it can hardly be tallied up. There is clear evidence that officials appointed by the administration from the banking industry, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, presidential economic advisor Lawrence Summers, and “Jobs Czar” Jeffrey Immelt, are guilty of frauds, crimes and coverups in the financial crisis that since 2008 have allowed them and their financial industry patrons and compatriots to steal literally trillions of dollars from American citizens and the US treasury. Only criminal prosecutions or a no-holds-barred Congressional investigation could lay out these crimes, but neither is remotely likely. There is similar corruption, on a smaller scale in dollars, but perhaps more devastating in its long-term impact, in the Education Department, where the private charter school industry is gradually taking over education policy with the connivance of Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan. * President Obama has violated the Posse Comitatus Act barring the use of federal troops on American soil, creating a domestic military command and using federal troops to bar the media and environmental activists from inspecting the damage from the BP Gulf oil spill, and later helping to try to break a strike at port facilities at Pacific coast ports by the International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union.
There has been an abject failure by President Obama to protect the United States from the terrible looming threat of climate change. Although his own Pentagon has declared that climate change poses far greater threats to US national security than terrorism, the president has over four years in office not only done almost nothing to try and combat this threat; he has actively undermined diplomatic efforts to achieve some kind of international coordinated action, even punishing those countries, like Bolivia and the Maldives, that have sought to do something concrete, and has adopted policies domestically, like approving more offshore oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean, that only make the crisis worse.
When I was writing my book about the impeachable crimes of the Bush/Cheney administration, there was at least a hope that Congress, then in the hands of the Democratic Party, might actually act and impanel an Impeachment Committee in the House. In the end, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) nixed that idea and strong-armed Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) into never seriously investigating that administration’s crimes, much less impaneling an impeachment committee.
I have no illusions that the current even more craven and spineless Congress, even with the House in the hands of Republicans, would seek to impeach this president. Indeed, many of the crimes listed above involve activities that the Republicans in Congress themselves actively support and are thus also guilty of, such as threatening Iran with war, supporting the ongoing theft of the nation’s wealth by the financial industry, or ignoring the threat of climate change.
It is nonetheless important, I believe, to publicly announce this bill of particulars, so that it is clear that we continue in the United States to be led by a gang of thieves and sociopaths.
The election of 2008 proved yet again that voting in the US is simply for show, at least as long as the public continues to be suckered into accepting the fake limitation of choice to the two parties, which actually compete only for the right to the patronage and financial spoils that come with winning. The real politics must be in our communities and in the street.
May 3rd, 2012 » Comments »
The great truth of Zen is possessed by everybody. Look into your own being and seek it not through others. Your own mind is above all forms; it is free and quiet and sufficient; it eternally stamps itself in your six senses and four elements. In its light all is absorbed. Hush the dualism of subject and object, forget both, transcend the intellect, sever yourself from the understanding, and directly penetrate deep into the identity of the Buddha-mind; outside of this there are no realities.
…Put your simple faith in this, discipline yourself accordingly; let your body and mind be turned into an inanimate object of nature like a stone or a piece of wood; when a state of perfect motionlessness and unawareness is obtained all the signs of life will depart and also every trace of limitation will vanish. Not a single idea will disturb your consciousness, when lo! All of a sudden you will come to realize the light abounding in full gladness. It is like coming across the light in thick darkness; it is like receiving treasure in poverty. The four elements and the five aggregates are no more felt as burdens; so light, so easy, so free you are. Your very existence has been delivered from all limitations; you have become open, light, and transparent.
You gain an illuminating insight into the very nature of things, which now appear to you as so many fairylike flowers having no graspable realities. Here is manifested the unsophisticated self which is the original face of your being; here is shown all bare the most beautiful landscape of your birthplace. There is but one straight passage open and unobstructed through and through.
This is so when you surrender all — your body, your life, and all that belongs to your inmost self. This is where you gain peace, ease, non-doing, and inexpressible delight. All the sutras and shastras are no more than communications of this fact; all the sages, ancient as well as modern, have exhausted their ingenuity and imagination to no other purpose that to point the way to this. It is like unlocking the door to a treasury; when the entrance is once gained, every object coming into your view is yours, every opportunity that presents itself is available for your use; for are they not, however multitudinous, all possessions obtainable within the original being of yourself? Every treasure there is but waiting for your pleasure and utilization. This is what is meant by ‘Once gained, eternally gained, even unto the end of time.’ Yet really there is nothing gained; what you have gained is no gain, yet there is something truly gained in this.
May 2nd, 2012 » Comments »
Hua hu Ching, Chapter 30
Words
can never convey
the beauty of a tree; to understand it,
you must see it with your own eyes. Language cannot capture
the melody of a song; to understand it, you must hear it
with your own ears. So it is with the Tao: the only
way to understand it is to directly
experience it.
The subtle truth
of the universe is unsayable
and unthinkable. Therefore the highest teachings
are wordless. My own words are not the medicine, but a prescription;
not the destination, but a map to help you reach it. When you get there, quiet
your mind and close your mouth. Don’t analyze the Tao. Strive
instead to live it: silently, undividedly,
with your whole harmonious
being.
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May 1st, 2012 » Comments »
“When civilizations start to die they go insane.”
When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.
The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic. The older form of human community was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. “The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx” is a series of observations derived from Marx’s reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the formation of Native American society, but also that “lands [were] owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by their occupants.” He wrote of the Aztecs, “Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related families.” He went on, “… reasons for believing they practiced communism in living in the household.” Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engel’s vision of communism.
Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies. The Iroquois Council of the Gens, where Indians came together to be heard as ancient Athenians did, was, Marx noted, a “democratic assembly where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” Marx lauded the active participation of women in tribal affairs, writing, “The women [were] allowed to express their wishes and opinions through an orator of their own election. Decision given by the Council. Unanimity was a fundamental law of its action among the Iroquois.” European women on the Continent and in the colonies had no equivalent power.
Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels. The pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—although they were not always idyllic and performed acts of cruelty including the mutilation, torture and execution of captives—did not subordinate the sacred to the technical. The deities they worshipped were not outside of or separate from nature.
Seventeenth century European philosophy and the Enlightenment, meanwhile, exalted the separation of human beings from the natural world, a belief also embraced by the Bible. The natural world, along with those pre-modern cultures that lived in harmony with it, was seen by the industrial society of the Enlightenment as worthy only of exploitation. Descartes argued, for example, that the fullest exploitation of matter to any use was the duty of humankind. The wilderness became, in the religious language of the Puritans, satanic. It had to be Christianized and subdued. The implantation of the technical order resulted, as Richard Slotkin writes in “Regeneration Through Violence,” in the primacy of “the western man-on-the-make, the speculator, and the wildcat banker.” Davy Crockett and, later, George Armstrong Custer, Slotkin notes, became “national heroes by defining national aspiration in terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust.”
The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding. Corporate hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators and the railroad magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, slaughtered the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their heirs wage war throughout the Middle East, pollute the seas and water systems, foul the air and soil and gamble with commodities as half the globe sinks into abject poverty and misery. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded drive for profit as handing over authority to the “beast.”
The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction. The Native Americans understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor. They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of the human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering.
In William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Prospero is stranded on an island where he becomes the undisputed lord and master. He enslaves the primitive “monster” Caliban. He employs the magical sources of power embodied in the spirit Ariel, who is of fire and air. The forces unleashed in the island’s wilderness, Shakespeare knew, could prompt us to good if we had the capacity for self-control and reverence. But it also could push us toward monstrous evil since there are few constraints to thwart plunder, rape, murder, greed and power. Later, Joseph Conrad, in his portraits of the outposts of empire, also would expose the same intoxication with barbarity.
The anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who in 1846 was “adopted” by the Seneca, one of the tribes belonging to the Iroquois confederation, wrote in “Ancient Society” about social evolution among American Indians. Marx noted approvingly, in his “Ethnological Notebooks,” Morgan’s insistence on the historical and social importance of “imagination, that great faculty so largely contributing to the elevation of mankind.” Imagination, as the Shakespearean scholar Harold C. Goddard pointed out, “is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two. … Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets.”
All that concerns itself with beauty and truth, with those forces that have the power to transform us, is being steadily extinguished by our corporate state. Art. Education. Literature. Music. Theater. Dance. Poetry. Philosophy. Religion. Journalism. None of these disciplines are worthy in the corporate state of support or compensation. These are pursuits that, even in our universities, are condemned as impractical. But it is only through the impractical, through that which can empower our imagination, that we will be rescued as a species. The prosaic world of news events, the collection of scientific and factual data, stock market statistics and the sterile recording of deeds as history do not permit us to understand the elemental speech of imagination. We will never penetrate the mystery of creation, or the meaning of existence, if we do not recover this older language. Poetry shows a man his soul, Goddard wrote, “as a looking glass does his face.” And it is our souls that the culture of imperialism, business and technology seeks to crush.
Walter Benjamin argued that capitalism is not only a formation “conditioned by religion,” but is an “essentially religious phenomenon,” albeit one that no longer seeks to connect humans with the mysterious forces of life. Capitalism, as Benjamin observed, called on human societies to embark on a ceaseless and futile quest for money and goods. This quest, he warned, perpetuates a culture dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing. It enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages, subservience to the commodity culture and debt peonage. The suffering visited on Native Americans, once Western expansion was complete, was soon endured by others, in Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The final chapter of this sad experiment in human history will see us sacrificed as those on the outer reaches of empire were sacrificed. There is a kind of justice to this. We profited as a nation from this demented vision, we remained passive and silent when we should have denounced the crimes committed in our name, and now that the game is up we all go down together.
May 1st, 2012 » Comments »
Favor
and disgrace are
equally problematic.
Hope and fear are
phantoms of
the body.
What
does it mean
that “favor and disgrace
are equally problematic”? Favor lifts
you up; disgrace knocks you down. Either
one depends on the opinions of
others and causes you to
depart from your
center.
What
does it mean that
“hope and fear are phantoms
of the body”? When you regard your body
as your self, hope and fear have real power over you.
If you abandon the notion of body as self, hope and fear
cannot touch you. Know the universe as your self,
and you can live absolutely anywhere in
comfort. Love the world as your self,
and you’ll be able to care
for it properly.
of the I Ching, Tao the Ching,
Hua hu Ching, and Art of War for
April 30th, 2012 » Comments »
I was
in town begging
when I met an old sage.
“Monk,” he said, “why do you live
in the cloud-covered peaks?” “Old fellow,”
I countered, “why do you remain in this
dusty place?” Neither of us spoke.
Then my reverie was shattered
by the sound of the
temple bell.
April 29th, 2012 » Comments »
Flowers,
sesame seed, bowls of fresh water,
a tuft of kusa-grass, all this altar paraphernalia
is not needed by someone who takes
the teacher’s words in and
honestly lives
them.
Full of
longing in meditation,
one sinks into a joy that is free of
any impulse to act and will
not enter a human
birth again.
April 27th, 2012 » Comments »
The I Ching, or Book of Changes: Hexagram 27, I / Corners of the Mouth (Providing Nourishment)
Give proper nourishment to yourself and others.
The image of this hexagram is that of an open mouth. It comes to remind us that the nourishment of our bodies and spirits is important and merits our conscientious attention.
The I Ching teaches us that if we wish to gauge someone’s character, we should notice what he nourishes in himself and in others. Those who cultivate inferior behavior and relationships are inferior people; those who cultivate superior qualities in themselves and others are superior people. This is a test that we should apply to ourselves as well as to others.
What you put into your body is obviously important. Because it determines your fundamental physical well-being, it is wise to be moderate and thoughtful about the food you eat. What you put into your mind is even more significant, and regulating it is a more subtle art. This hexagram gives us three-part advice on that subject.
This first counsel is that we should not feed our minds on desire. When we forego our equanimity and begin to desire something or someone, a host of other inferior influences comes into play: we become ambitious about obtaining the object of our desire; we become fearful that we will not; if we do achieve it our ego is gratified and strengthened and it soon issues another demand for us to meet. A self-reinforcing cycle of negativity is thus created. Therefore it is wise to hold yourself free from desire.
The second counsel is that we begin and continue in a regular practice of meditation. Sitting quietly with our eyes closed for even as little as ten or fifteen minutes a day begins to “clear the waste” out of our hearts and minds, making room for the nourishment of peace and wisdom to enter in. To sit in meditation is to tune your ear to the voice of the Sage, and it is the most powerful way of gaining his assistance.
The final counsel is that we observe tranquility in speech, thoughts, and actions. By cultivating calm and equanimity in all that you say, think, and do, you nourish your superior self and that of these around you. One who follows these three counsels now will meet with good fortune.
A Guide to Life’s Turning Points:
Hexagram 27, I / Corners of the Mouth
of the I Ching, Tao the Ching,
Hua hu Ching, and Art of War for
April 26th, 2012 » Comments »
Read every word of this and pass it to your neighbor.
Levon Helm, drummer and singer of The Band, passed away from throat cancer last week. The outpouring of love directed his way over the last week, from every corner of the world, was remarkable. His family did an interesting thing too; they told the world before he died that he was in his final stages of battling cancer. About twenty-four hours after I’d heard the announcement of his declining health, reports came in that he’d passed away.
We were sad, but not surprised. Then the eulogies began. One remembrance I heard read on the radio, from Elton John, moved me to tears. It had never occurred to me that his song, “Levon,” was inspired by Levon Helm. Well it was, and not only that; Elton John’s son’s middle name is Levon too. So it’s fair to say he revered the guy. And with reason; Levon Helm made music that made you move and made you feel. It made you wince.
It made you say “Turn that shit up.” And to think that the nasty, brilliant drums AND that gutsy, forlorn voice that sounded like it bubbled up out of the Mississippi mud was coming out of ONE dude – Mr. Levon Helm – is something that inspires and depresses musicians forty-plus years after he showed up on the scene.
I don’t need an excuse to listen to The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down;” I listen to it all the time anyway. But the thought that the man who brought that song to me, and to you, would be joining its narrator, Virgil Caine, in the Great Beyond, made me crank it many times, good and loud, by myself and with my family in the days before and after Helm passed. I might have been listening to it when he died.
It felt good to hold my one year old son and move to that song and see him smile. At the same time, it made me sad, as always, to hear Virgil sing about his brother who was killed at age eighteen in the Civil War. One thing that always struck me about that song (which, it must be stated, was written by one of The Band’s other geniuses, Robbie Robertson) is that it immediately puts you in the shoes of a Southerner at the close of the Civil War, and you are extremely sad when you learn that Virgil’s brother, a confederate soldier, is dead. He was killed in a war that nearly destroyed our nation; in a war that killed more soldiers than every other war the United States has fought before and since, combined. The lyrics of the song are few and they’re quite simple and they put you right there in the barren Tennessee dirt with hungry Virgil and his wife and they make you care about what Virgil cared about.
I was born in Boston in 1977, a century and a quarter after Virgil, and a thousand miles north of him. About as far above the Mason-Dixon line as you can get, geographically and ideologically. But I love Virgil. I mourn his brother. His brother didn’t own slaves and neither did he. They didn’t own them because they were poor. But Virgil’s brother fought for the Confederate Army because he was a healthy eighteen year old who didn’t have a choice. Then, as the song tells us, “a Yankee laid him in his grave.”
This song is so useful to me because, in addition to its empiric beauty, it’s one of the more effective works of art I’ve ever encountered at putting its listener in a pair of shoes he’s not used to wearing. When I put on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” it turns me immediately into a bereft young Tennessee farmer who’d fill a company of Union soldiers full of lead to bring my big brother back to help me out on my farm and be my friend.
Back here in 2012, I have a sister I love dearly and it would be a delight to wade into hail of gunfire to protect her. You probably have a sister or a brother you’d do the same for. It’s what siblings do, or would do, for each other.
This all makes me think of the civil war taking place in our country today. To be accurate, it’s a civil cold war or sorts, though I believe it exacts a toll on our nation’s soul that is far steeper than the more famous and studied cold war that took place between the United States and the Soviet Union. I’m talking about the acrimony that our government and media, and the corporations that support them, stir up between regular folks like you and me. It’s there every day, but it reaches a fever pitch during our poisonous and ever-lengthening election seasons. We’re told by CNN or FOX News that you can either be a Democrat or a Republican; half of us need to be one and half of us need to be the other and we must define ourselves by our desire to crush, subvert or absorb the other one. An “us and them” mentality is foisted upon us. It doesn’t matter what side you’re one, as long as you pick one. It is critical to the success of this illusion that we remain trapped in that struggle, actually hating each other, while our highways and railroads fall apart, health care costs skyrocket, the national average body mass index balloons, and schools shuffle toward bankruptcy.
It is INSANITY to believe that what FIFTY PERCENT of Americans want is bad, wrong, or destructive to the country and its citizens at large. If that were true, the country wouldn’t be here anymore, or it would resemble a Cormac McCarthy novel, and it wouldn’t be All the Pretty Horses.
I have the wonderful good fortune to be a dyed in the wool Yankee married to a beautiful hillbilly woman from the South. I am doubly blessed to have a career that involves traveling around the country, meeting people from every walk of life. And God damn it if this place isn’t exploding with wonderful people. I know because I’ve spoken to them, touched them, and when they’re not looking, sniffed their hair. Am I supposed to have a meal, or a conversation, or share pictures of our kids with someone in Greenville, Mississippi or Portland, Oregon, have a great time and some laughs, and then “unlike” them and designate them a mortal enemy after they reveal who they voted for in 2008? According to political strategists or news producers,literally yes. But, as luck would have it, I’m a human being, and that’s impossible. The Republican candidate for President isn’t a human being. Neither is the Democratic candidate. Neither is your Senator or Congressman and neither is the chairman of the board of the company that made your cellphone. There might be a real person in there somewhere, but we’ll never know them. High, high up near the top of their job description is the responsibility to their handlers and donors to keep you and me suspicious of each other, envious of each other, and angry at each other.
The more they can get us to sign on to the lie that the plumber in Sacramento has different wants, needs and desires from the opthamologist in Lexington, Kentucky, the more secure their position is and the more money and power that will come their way. And baby —> it’s a Lie. That plumber in California wants food on the table, a bed to sleep in, and safety and security for their kids. After that’s taken care of, a job to report to in the morning and a little dough in the bank come next. After that, it’s all gravy. And that eye doctor in Kentucky wants the same things, to the letter. And the color of the necktie on the guy they voted for, or the radio station they listen to in the morning has right around nothing to do with whether or how they get those things. Introduce that plumber to that doctor at an airport or in the stands at a baseball game and they’re going to like each other and have things to talk about. They’re different, but they’re the same. The pernicious illusion that what is bad for one of them could be good for the other one needs to be destroyed. Or it’ll destroy us.
I can’t speak for Levon Helm or Robbie Robertson (or Sammy Davis, Jr., in whose Los Angeles home they converted into a studio to record “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,”) but those gentlemen made a work of art that reached out across the decades to me and made me feel love and empathy and kinship with someone who I would’ve thought was different than me in the past, but that I now know isn’t. And if I’m like Virgil, than you are too, and you and I are even closer to each other. And whether you like it or not, (and you better get to liking it) you depend on me and your neighbor more than you do a pundit or a lobbyist or the CEO of BizKorp. And we depends on you. So let’s get some Golden Rule going up in this bitch.
April 25th, 2012 » Comments »
In spite of knowing,
Yet still believing.
Though no god above,
Yet god within.
There is no god in the sense of a cosmic father or mother who will provide all things to their children. Nor is there some heavenly bureaucracy to petition. These models are not descriptions of a divine order, but are projections from archetypal templates. If we believe in the divine as cosmic family, we relegate ourselves to perpetual adolescence. If we regard the divine as supreme government, we are forever victims of unfathomable officialdom.
Yet it does not work for us to totally abandon faith. It does not follow that we can forego all belief in higher beings. We need faith, not because there are beings who will punish us or reward us, but because gods are wonderful ways of describing things that happen to us. They embody the highest aspects of human aspiration. Gods on the altars are essential metaphors for the human spiritual experience.
Faith shouldn’t be shaken because bad things happen to us or because our loved ones are killed. Good and bad fortune are not in the hands of gods, so it is useless to blame them. Neither does faith need to be confirmed by some objective occurrence. Faith is self-affirming. If we maintain faith, then we have its reward. If we become better people, then our faith has results. It is we who create faith, and it is through our efforts that faith is validated.
April 25th, 2012 » Comments »
i’m supposed to write down what i want of my father’s when he dies.
on the pad i sketch a jogger going by on the country road.
the road is narrow, tangled, dangerous.
i give her a bumper in the sketch.
the bumper is light in the sketch. easy to carry.
any car that would hit her in the sketch is also light
and could be erased. i check the eraser, it’s ready
to save a life.
your jupiter, i write on the pad.
your subway system.
a group of bicyclists whoosh along, their thighs big
as wind. there’s something of a cricket sound
to the collective tickings of metal they depend on.
i confess to the pad
that i want all of my father’s crickets.
his entire night, for that matter.
i’ve been thinking of getting away.
there’s a tree some hundred yards off
i’ve been wanting to get a brochure about,
something glossy and mostly blue that will tell me
about the museums and cafés to be found under the tree.
your insouciance.
your aardvark.
when i see my father, he lists the things i’m too late
to claim. your sister gets the colossus of rhodes.
your other sister gets the tire iron. soon
there will be nothing left.
i’ve tried to explain
that i don’t like looking at living things
as dead things until it’s evident that the chickadee
did break it’s neck and probably also
cracked it’s skull when it hit the window. the whole time
that this was likely the case
but there was still thrashing in the holly,
i referred always with my emotions
to the life of the chickadee and never considered
which feather of its many i wanted or how i might fly.
your lean.
i’d like your lean against the counter
when you’ve just done the dishes and someone
has said something that stops you
from going outside to say goodnight to the lawn mower.
the lawn mower can go to hell.
all that decapitating at high speeds and noise, all that stink.
once, when i was very young, when i was forty years
from sitting here with this pad and this task, i thought,
i hope mom makes pudding tonight.
give me that, old man. and the river and the frogs
and the first time i stayed up to touch dusk
with you both on the couch and you both
unaware of how tingly that moment was to my skin.
the rest requires shelves and boxes and garages
and weighs a ton and will anyway get lost
or die of rust and bears no love for the tingly skin.
your thirty-third breath.
your lifeline to scold.
April 22nd, 2012 » Comments »
Connect the dots.
Unlike the United States, some democracies take the international and domestic rule of law seriously. That’s especially true of countries that once suffered under totalitarianism of various sorts, like communism in Poland. And so we are beginning to see glimmers of legal accountability from Europe for the war crimes perpetrated by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The EU long ago reported the existence of torture sites in Poland and Romania, and one of the EU investigators of these war crimes was former Solidarity member, Józef Pinior. He insists he saw something important:
Pinior has always claimed that, during his investigations, he was told about a document signed by Leszek Miller, Poland’s Prime Minister at the time the CIA prison was in operation, providing information regulating the operations of the prison – in a military intelligence training base in Stare Kiejkuty in north eastern Poland – including information about how, if necessary, to deal with corpses inside the facility.
My italics (but this isn’t the only formal recognition of deaths in the torture archipelago). We know, because even the Pentagon has confirmed, that several prisoners held under the Bush-Cheney administration were tortured to death. That those running the program knew that the techniques were brutal enough to risk occasional deaths of the victims adds one extra layer of criminality and evil to the process. The case in Poland appears to have been slowed but not halted by the prosecutors, aware of where it might lead. But one nugget will surely strike home in Poland, as told by Adam Krzykowski, a journalist for Polish public TV, and the first reporter to provide proof of the landing in Poland of a specific rendition plane:
Off the record, Wojciech Czuchnowski and I also obtained information about the location where people suspected of terrorism and kidnapped by the CIA were detained, on the premises of the so-called spy school in Stare Kiejkuty in the Mazury region, about 20 km from the airport in Szymany, where planes landed which were used by the CIA. We were also informed about the existence of another relevant building, a two-storey villa — once named as “Marcus Wolf Villa” in honour of the founder of the East German intelligence service — which appeared to have been used as a back office, and may have included housing for the interrogators. It seems that both the villa and the presumed prison building were located in a specific section of the grounds occupied by the spy school, which was separate from the rest and even more heavily guarded.
Isn’t there something grotesquely appropriate in that Bush and Cheney, in importing into the US the torture techniques of totalitarian regimes, used one building named in honor of the founder of the East German Stasi? They remain war criminals, and the rule of law in America remains unenforced by the Obama administration on the core issue of torture. But not all politicians are as craven as Obama on this. Here’s the current conservative prime minister of Poland, Donald Tusk:
“Poland will not be a country anymore where politicians will arrange something under the table and it will not come to light, even if they do it hand-in-hand with the biggest empire in the world,” and “those in power must be able very effectively to safeguard the dignity of the Polish state; in other words, they must act only in accordance with their conscience, Polish law and international law.”
Good for Poland. There is far more accountability in that new democracy than is allowed to exist in this one.
April 21st, 2012 » Comments »
Levon Helm, 26 May 1940 ~ 19 April 2012
That’s just
a beautiful portrait
of a beautiful fellow, isn’t it?
A perfect little story
accompanies it
