One War

Recently I commented on Smoking Mirrors that I no longer visited sites that stopped posting Visible's work. Ah, but that didn't include Donald Hunt's economic essays. And now, here I am exposing myself as, errrr, a liar-by-omission because I neglected to include this very disclaimer in my comment. Actually, at the time I made that comment, I was sincere, but the global financial crisis is such a Rubik's Cube of torture in the war on the little people's survival in this world, I consider it a principle element of our own survival strategies to try to understand it, as much as we can understand something that morphs and feeds and grows into full blown indiscriminate evil with increasing opacity in rhythm with humanity's heartbeat.

While we are gathering wood or fertilizing our soils or documenting the last remaining open spaces of the 19th and 20th centuries, there will be times you will ask yourself what happened or what could possibly come next and after that, and that, and that. Still, despite reading, talking, looking at it, breathing it, I'm just as much in the dark as anybody.

My dual loyalty would then be to the truth and to survival. No blame.

I have no idea why Sott has Donald Hunt's works co-authored by Simon Davies now. It seems that pairing came around when they achieved their funding goal, coincidentally while dumping Smoking Mirrors. They used to have a forum too, which also appears to have been eliminated in the restructuring. One of the few times I posted there was during the early Laurel Canyon series in which I trashed it as incredibly myopic and regional crack-crazed gossip driven by McGowan's moral lens of six degrees of false desire. Regardless, I still check in once a week to read Mr. Hunt's spectacular analyses. Mr. Hunt, BTW, came to my defense on that thread, apparently he was there too. Truth is his sword and only the truth. What we can learn from Wednesday's entry is dire. And what's more, as we read along, we know this is what is happening, but because we are the little people, pounded with news designed just for little people, you'll be hard pressed to find this kind of analysis coming from certain journalists who like Sott perhaps, are beholden to to keep themselves alive in whatever manner to which they are accustomed by claiming they "provide a service". The little people mostly forgive them, what do they know anyway, and go right on reading and funneling their severance pay into the paypal vacuum bag.


If we were to synthesize most of what is being written and read, we could liken it to press releases from the Illusion, a huge, superpower colony consisting of perhaps aliens, or not, with technologies we cannot begin to conceive.

There are two worlds.

There exists the world of the truth, our real world, and the world of the Illusion. The Illusion, for example has its celebrities, its uniforms and its groupies, its insurances, institutions, its history, its military security complex, its money economy, "F.I.R.E.", its laws and its law enforcement, its corporations, its reams of forms and complicity agreements, its medical/pharmaceutical universe, its agriprocessors, its slogans and logos and its endlessly self-replicating spawn of byproduct offspring. Yes, there's plenty more, but you get the idea. We could, if we think about it long enough, perhaps see it as one all-encompassing system powered by false desire, i.e.; money and ego.


Plenty of people work very hard overcoming obstacles trying in vain to keep one foot in both worlds. They choose to believe it can be done and after all, for these people it must be done since they believe they have no other option. They have grown dependent on false belief which can be defined as false hope. The Illusion specializes in not being there when you actually have a need for their advertised services, like that moment when your computer breaks down, like those moments when some consumed merchandise proves itself defective and the warranty (forms/insurance/agreements/logos) expired. Oh, but they can always be found yukking it up with pole dancers weaving in the background at the pizzeria chowing down a few oversized submarines while outdoing one another imagining new and evermore clever ways to hijack the soul of the little people. One thing they seem to do on a regular basis is merge by swallowing themselves and reappearing in disguise. Kweisi Mfume famously noted "When they are tired of arguing with you, they send in someone who looks just like you to finish it off."


The little people, at last count, are losing the battle. If they are not running for cover from white phosphorus, they are glued to barstools accelerating their internet connections. This is a sad fact, but only one out of perhaps millions and billions of sadder facts. As Don Roberston put it "... The truth is, the empirical creations that give sustenance to our existence are all coming undone ... "

Then what, now, is the difference between our depressions and the Depression? A stimulus package and an antidepressant? Does the Illusion have the dough to back up its desire? If yes, the jig is up.

photo: Getty Images

Its Snowing in the Heart of Darkness

I learned rudimentary Spanish in New York food shopping on the Lower East Side. "Mira, Mira," the kids shouted, to what I have no idea, probably to the blind beggar hanging just outside the doors. As if poor mister blind man reduced to a passerby's benevolence would suddenly regain his eyesight and answer back. My Spanish progressed from there to shell game epithets and eventually to Lambada Portuguese.

New York in my mind is always snowy, dirty slush, dark gray and garbage brown. You learn to walk looking straight ahead avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk and the stamped metal covers hinged over stairs leading down into steampipe cellars. You learn that all of life is like that, if you want to avoid being diverted from whatever was your destination, you don't look anywhere but that distant glazed somewhere that you think you are going.

I used to think I had a destination, but really, my destination was to walk under Miles's window and mark time until the sweetness of his tenor sax put a soundtrack to the movements of the people and the one-man parade of the commoner King in ermine robes who carried his little feline princes stacked pyramid-style in a radio flyer, Mira Mira.


I got stranded in the snow in midtown one night, everything was silent, no buses, no people, I'd stayed too long and late at one location and wanted to go home. A lone limo snaked up sixth avenue and I was young enough and trusting enough to accept a ride. The gentleman in the back wanted to know all about me, what I did, what I thought, and we are always ready with charming answers, aren't we? As the limo neared my block I realized I learned nothing about him, I wanted something to remember, something more than being saved from hypothermia, so I started interrogating in an unassuming way of course, obviously this man and his driver were very decent people. He was an actor he said.


Well, then are you famous? Do films? Anything I would have seen? He wasn't sure what I'd seen, he thought I might like his most recent work, Apocalypse Now, it would be showing up soon. And that was that.


I couldn't wait for the film. As soon as I saw it advertised, I purchased tickets and camped outside the theater until it was time for the lines to file in. I pretended I was fainting so I could be first in the door. My brother played along, notifying the attendants. Studying the show cards in the lobby, the crowd still outside, I saw my savior was Robert Duvall.


I loved the movie, it changed me forever. I started wearing an Army/Navy surplus flak jacket and asking questions like "Who's in charge here?" I became a sort of walking encyclopedia on the film, the trouble they'd had making it, the actors, the lines, which led me to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the Ivory Wars. I began to notice things I wouldn't have otherwise.

I traveled to Iquitos and chronicled the aftermath of the rubber rape. I stayed in huts deep in the jungle and got drunk on midnight canoe rides while missionaries converted children and crocodiles slithered at the waters edge. It was a place you learned to look straight ahead while leaping over tarantula caves or crossing tributaries on a slender branch without providing a meal for the Piranha.


I saw that life is a riverboat moving with the currents where strange and evil reptiles and frightened monkeys hang from trees overhead as you glide along. It is true we can pass a savage genocide in progress and we can pass the business interests responsible just a little farther up the bend. Mira Mira. But if you get off the boat, you are guaranteed to have hungry tigers jumping on you as you're trying to wade waist high to safe shores or you will find yourself an unwelcome intruder smack in the middle of someone else's Apocalypse where grocery clerks and errand boys serve a mad god on his way into a worse hell than the one you already thought you found.

Shyorongi Codetta

Shyorongi Village resident Evariste Ahimana said he was forced by a mob to take part in the clubbing death of his neighbor. This is some of what was written about Rwanda's Genocide when the ten year passing was observed in 2004.

Doing Violence to the Truth

... Evariste Ahimana can’t even utter the word “one” to tell how many people he killed in Rwanda’s genocide. He just holds up a finger to represent what he did – clubbing a neighbor named Augustin Murinda, whom he liked and often drank with – at the behest of strangers from the next village. Since returning to this village after his release from prison last year, Ahimana has walked past the house of his victim’s brother every week as he climbed the hill to the church. Walking downhill after prayers and confession, he has never stopped to apologize. When he passes the brother on the narrow dirt paths of the village, the two men greet each other, but their eyes never meet.
“I’m planning to say sorry one day,” Ahimana said. “It’s not so much reluctance to go as lack of strength.” Leaning on a wooden stick in his house, with pictures of Mary and Jesus tacked to the wall, he says he can’t be held responsible: An armed mob forced him to kill the man....

And more:

Friday, March 19, 2004
Article by the Amazing Gabi, Rwandan journalist for Hirondelle News agency:

CLAMPING KILLERS AND SURVIVORS TOGETHER

By Gabriel Gabiro Shyorongi, February 18th, 2004 (FH) – After a brief wait inside a stuffy little house in the middle of a thick banana grove, a small shy
man dressed in tired farm clothes and a flat cap made of part cloth, part red mud emerges from the front door clutching a machete. One can’t help but immediately try to visualize to how many uses Evariste Ahimana, 50 and a
confessed killer, may have put the soiled machete in his hands. At the start of the 1994 genocide, Ahimana and a group of his ethnic Hutu friends and fellow farmers swept through the hills and valleys of this remote Central Rwanda town of Shyorongi rummaging through all possible hideouts for their Tutsi neighbours before killing them. For the ‘work’ - a popular euphemism for ‘killing’ - they used machetes, cudgels, hoes, axes or any other farm tool they could lay their hands on...

There is a slide show here beginning with the photo of Mr. Ahimana that I used in telling his story . I didn't see the slide show until tonight because I read it in the physical paper in 2004 for a "newsreel in artworks" series. Drop the newspaper subscriptions and one naturally progresses to sagebrush oceans and clouds. Slide show photo number 16 is a must see also.

Andrew moves into the Lighthouse at last

Andrew Wyeth left this plane, early today, while sleeping they said. Fare thee well and Godspeed. You will be missed of course, selfishly I admit. I wanted to see what else was coming, but after thinking about it hard and long this morning, I see what happened. You got so close to Nature's perfection you breathed-in the last deep scent of her seasons and chose to stay. And now you are all you ever wanted. I think of you, today traveling beyond Christina's World, somewhere you are hanging out with John Lennon, Jimi and JFK and Bobby and Leonardo and Pablo and Winslow and Whistler, pitching-in with the making of rain and wind and mixing mysterious tints human eyes cannot perceive, and maybe flirting just a little with Georgia, the way you did with my mother, in Maine, before you grew up and met the woman who would stay with you for the remainder of this brief journey in your handsome envelope which in the end, could never contain such a survivalist's soul. Goodbye for now, but not forever.

sketches in scale

I've got an architectural scale, its a neat tool for these times and quite different from a ruler or a yardstick. Mine is red at one end and teal on the other, red being the measurement representing various levels of lies and teal for degrees of truth. My scale happens to be sitting with me today as I make the rounds of blogs and news sites. The red end is glowing like hot chunky coals in our fireplace. I hope its not melting, but it could because everything out there suggests Bernie M. , whom I'm guessing surely must be in the distant acquaintance of Bernie K., isn't going to see one day in the pokey. No Way! Why? Because while Bernie K. counts his blessings in taser growth, along comes a Junior-Bernie M., in the physical body of "one bad pilot", Investor Shrencker, captured in the bloody act of wrist slashing. I held the scale over this story. Neon red. I decided to hold the scale over the widely viewed, original photo of Bernie M. and watched the red jump the way mercury does in a thermometer - until it paused at pale teal.

It must be the degree, I thought. Big Bernie M. wrapped up his spoils and gifted his blood relations while the minor league Schrencker burned his own Mother and Father out of their $135K retirement. How wicked! Worse than what we've heard is the most wicked ripoff in history.

I told you there were more Bernies to come. It does not stop here. At this very moment there are New York waterbugs nesting and breeding right in your very own attics, you just haven't met them yet.

The peculiar manner in which Schrencker's tale is told could be laid bare immediately if someone would just say whether or not his aerial windshield was shattered, or didn't they notice? Oh, why go to such laborious detail when the drama is so much better as law enforcement saves criminal investor to face judgement day? Anyway, none of that matters, what matters is the scale here and its might just be too hot to touch. The mini-Madoff's morals make "Big Bernie the Ripper" look sweet and almost innocent by comparison. As in innocent mistakes.

The architectural scale is an extended triangle, ever seen one? You can turn it over and then over again, each side and each end reveals increasingly smaller ways to measure something real and come up with a perfect representation of that thing except it is not real at all, but to the casual observer it just looks real. One inch equals one foot, or one-half inch equals one foot, or one-eighth inch equals one foot and so forth, there are metrics included as well. I know you've seen one.

I lifted up the glowing end to the Geithner appointment and it quivered. I moved in closer and held it to his photo. The scale flew out of my grip like hot ash. Now, you would really think after Bernie Kerick, Sopranos wannabe, notoriously flubbed the opportunity to taser the nation, reportedly due to nannygate escapades that Richard Gere, I mean Geithner should have
known better, wouldn't you? This is when you get one of those monkey fist in the cookie jar mental pictures. Well, its okay, Obie Wan Kanobe has waved the scale, Geithner soon enough will be superior to the IRS. They will overlook his innocent inattentiveness to those tax years 2001-04. And we are to just calm down now because nannygate episodes and stuffing away three years of taxes are always innocent mistakes. Besides, he's paid now, knowing what magnificence lay ahead. We need Mister G., he's gonna fix the money mess as apparently no one else out of three hundred million Americans has the economic wizardry to do... except, and I hate to say this, Bernie Madoff.

My scale shows he's much closer to the truth with a pale teal reading, at least he understood the issues enough to ensure that Mrs. Madoff hired and pays for his round-the-clock court-ordered guardians preventing his flight from justice or contact with the Postal authority. To date, he has not been indicted.

In the magic land of Golden Rule bedtime stories, Bernie M. will someday surface as the King of
the New World Order. Can you see it? With a staff glowing red and the teal, gone. There will be no teal, no Gaza, no Iraq and whomever is leftover holidays in timeshares on beautiful Lake Afghanistan.

I don't recommend troubling your brain wondering just how it is the future will wind up in Cracked magazine, we're already off to a great start. Whenever we are witness to something genuinely puke-worthy, just remind yourself something worse is suffering birth pangs.

q + a

"The more I allow the man to look at me, the more I see god in him--or he is god--and the woman--us--one, nothing without the other."

I wasn't exactly sure what Jj was talking about, but if he was talking about *Outside Woman Outside Man that statement is an astounding insight. *Scroll down to larger works below posts for reference.

More Jj: "... is the neighborhood changing--not Les, but the renters?"

Yes, its been changing all along. Its worked out so well you could almost think is was the destiny of our package deals. You see, once you sign on Jj, you enter into a portal to an Andromeda-like Galaxy from which you emerge more than you were. It takes some longer than others, like plants sprouting, some are closer to the sun's radiation and thrive. Those that succeed, flower in the most surprising, unimaginable ways. Muslim banking, soil testing, gekos, the system, frauds, firewood, UFOs, ignorance, backpacks, Zen benches, Haikus, bundgee cords, solar systems, good and evil, art appreciation, stoveularisms, poetry, photography, there's too much to mention here. And still it grows. It has no end. All who pass through the Visible portal have a story to tell from the one mind, something that the evidence proves interests all of us.

On a personal note, I see it as a masterwork. A totally interactive, morphing, talking, Visible installation. Its better than the Cyclorama in Atlanta where you stand in the center of a circular building and walk round and round viewing the Civil War battles in 3-D, no matter which direction you look, its moss and plantations burning, the Union and the Confederacy in blood. It has an intense reality to it. People are effected by the the lifelike figures and the sounds of cannons and gunshots, running slaves, gathering storms overhead beneath the dry ice smoke and simulated fires.


unknown photo 2006


On long driving trips, at night, crossing the hills and dales of the high plains, I would see nothing for a hundred miles and then, like clockwork, like expectation had become, there would be a group of small homes nestled closely, porch lights on, bunches of vehicles and kids toys about the yards and I knew without a doubt people naturally group together. There was, all around them, plenty of space to live separated, but it happened so many times and still always does if you have a chance to notice it. And when you think about the nature of the phenomena we can see with our own eyes, you know you are seeing the truth about ourselves and our natural needs for love, acceptance and community.

We never need be rigid about it, great hurry makes for great confusion as in the commands "evacuate" or "rush" or words like "threat" or "warning" - ooooooo danger... one's time also is best used when they are learning something they have wanted to understand solely for themselves. There is an art to all of it, wouldn't you agree, a fine art and we are the living testimonial.

But if you don't have the taste for love and belonging today, it doesn't matter, the subject of depression soon come. Anguish, sorrow, loneliness and loss are just more petals on the stem.

in the here and now

In attempting to keep up with THE BIG MESS have you remembered to check the market stats just to see how Wall Street is taking it? Week ending January 2nd, things are still bubbling along, no extremes: BigCharts

At least not the extremes we've so recently experienced. Why is this? Wouldn't you think as Day Eight of the "conflict" explodes into a 10,000 troop ground assault the market would have teetered by week's end? No, you wouldn't think that.

Not when weapons sales are so profitable. It is a most upside down backwards situation where delusion and terror reign supreme over the Earth. This isn't how its supposed to be, not what we thought life had in store for humans, but reviewing history, it IS what IS and always has been, only now technology is in place to speed it all up, like its on meth. Meth, another profitable weapon. How sane is that? And how sane, if true, is this? The Gaza Bombshell

I have come to hate the word "foment". Its never used in context with decency, is it.

Nothing prevents evil activity accompanied with blatant denial to run the whole show anywhere. Give it time. Its like you are walking down the street passing by a theater marquee that reads "Upcoming Features: Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide, Humanitarian Crisis".

Reminder: If you are not repairing the Dignity in dry dock, or sailing on your own, don't forget to continue to put into practice your personal survival strategies at this time. Doing nothing is not an option. In case you missed it last summer, I am reposting Charles's amazing piece Where Rubber Meets the Road for working solutions:

."..This isn't an exhaustive list but it's a start. Much of it will not be popular because it isn't a "high tech solution" and it all requires work, learning, responsibility and paying attention--all the traits which our "entertainment" obsession erodes, discounts and destroys."

I can tell by my spam and suspect email cache that the retailers are losing ground. Last fall it was free shipping, now items that were once $149.00 are going for $10.99. Many catalogues in the mailbox have stickers on the outside saying "You have not purchased anything yet!" Newsflash guys, we are not going to, either. If we are going down, who cares about doing it in a Leopardskin smoking jacket with matching open-toed mules?

Meanwhile, firewood gathering and stacking, burning, fireplace cleaning, ash disposal, adjustments to the fire itself for greatest warmth have all become a nonstop, never-ending routine around here. There has been much snow, hail, ice rain and now, today, drizzle and fog. Wood fuel foraging and storage will have to continue all year long, summer is no exception. Charles is RIGHT, it is work, hard and dirty work, it isn't entertaining, it is survival. Survival as you know, is freedom.

Sodabox at High Noon

for William Carlos Williams

14" x 20" watercolor on Arches

Summer 2007