Fred's Bulletin Board is a regularly posted, poetic, political and philosophical posting of persepctives on the current human condition.

After September 11, 2001 I began sending missives out on an irregular basis to friends and acquaintances on my mailing list.

It was a strange time for all of us.

In a year, it grew to be a comfort to others and therapy for me just to send stuff out that mirrored my own frustrations and sensibilities.

Indexed here are a number of the more recent samplings.

       BLESSINGS ON YOR HEAD~~

To subscribe/unsubscribe to Fred's Bulletin Board, please send email request to mitouer@mcn.org

October 10, 2007--

I saw this a couple of months ago but tonight I'm moved to send it to you....x/f


http://www.maniacworld.com/Phone-Salesman-Amazes-Crowd.html

 This is really  unbelievable!  
 
 Take a minute and watch  this... makes your heart feel good! Watch the faces of the judges as  this guy walks out on stage. You can imagine what they're thinking as  they pre-judge this guy based on his looks and the fact that he's a  cell phone salesman.  
 
 So much for first impressions.  

May 3, 2007

Oh Yeah~x/f

The hippies were right all along

   -- we knew that


Mark Morford
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/02/DDG1UPIHBB1.DTL&hw=Mark+Morford&sn=001&sc=1000
Wednesday, May 2,  200

Go ahead, name your movement. Name  something good and positive and pro-environment and eco-friendly that's  happening in the newly "greening" of America and don't say more guns in Texas  or fewer reproductive choices for women because that would defeat the whole  point of this perky little column and destroy its naive tone of happy  rose-colored optimism. OK?  

I'm talking about, say,  energy-efficient lightbulbs. I'm looking at organic foods going mainstream. I  mean chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target and I'm  talking saving the whales and protecting the dolphins. I mean yoga studios  flourishing in every small town, giant boxes of organic cereal at Costco and  the Toyota Prius becoming the nation's oddest status symbol. You know, good  things.  

Look around: We have entire industries  devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology  and an Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth." Even the soulless corporate monsters  over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they  really, really care about saving the environment because, well, "it's the  right thing to do" (read: "It's purely economic and all about their bottom  line").  

There is but one conclusion you can  draw from the astonishing pro-environment sea change happening in the culture  and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power in D.C., one thing we must  all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had  it right all along.  

All this hot enthusiasm for healing the  planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature  and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies.  Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals?  Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMA seeds? It came  from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient  cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the  sidelines and from far off the grid and it's about time the media, the  politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, hemp-covered apology.   

Here's a suggestion, from one of my  more astute ex-hippie readers: Instead of issuing carbon credits so industrial  polluters can clear their collective corporate conscience, maybe, to help  offset all the damage they've done to the soul of the planet all these years,  these commercial cretins should instead buy some karma credits from the former  hippies themselves. You know, from those who've been working for the health of  the planet, quite thanklessly, for 50 years and who have, as a result, built  up quite a storehouse of good karma. You think?  

Of course, you can easily argue that  much of the "authentic" hippie ethos -- the anti-corporate ideology, the  sexual liberation, the anarchy, the push for civil rights, the experimentation  -- has been totally leached out of all these new movements, that corporations  have forcibly co-opted and diluted every single technology and humble  pro-environment idea and Ben & Jerry's ice cream cone and Odwalla smoothie  to make them both palatable and profitable. But does this somehow make the  organic oils in that body lotion any more harmful? Verily, it does not.  

You might also just as easily claim  that much of the nation's reluctant turn toward environmental health has  little to do with the hippies per se, that it's taking the threat of global  meltdown combined with the notion of really, really expensive ski tickets to  slap the nation's incredibly obese butt into gear and force consumers to wake  up to the gluttony and wastefulness of American culture as everyone starts  wondering, "Oh my God, what's going to happen to swimming pools and NASCAR and  free shipping from Amazon?" Of course, without the '60s groundwork, without  all the radical ideas and seeds of change planted nearly five decades ago,  what we'd be turning to in our time of need would be a great deal more  hopeless indeed.  

But if you're really bitter and  shortsighted, you could say the entire hippie movement overall was just  incredibly overrated, gets far too much cultural credit for far too little  actual impact, was pretty much a giant excuse to slack off and enjoy dirty,  lazy, responsibility-free sex romps and do a ton of drugs and avoid Vietnam  and not bathe for a month and name your child Sunflower or Shiva Moon or  Chakra Lennon Sapphire Bumblebee. This is what's called the reactionary  simpleton's view. It blithely ignores history, perspective, the evolution of  culture as a whole. You know, just like America.  

But, you know, whatever. The proof is  easy enough to trace. The core values and environmental groundwork laid by the  '60s counterculture are still so intact and potent that even the stiffest  neocon Republican has to acknowledge their extant power. It's all right there:  Treehugger.com is the new '60s underground hippie zine. Ecstasy is the new  LSD. Visible tattoos are the new longhairs. And bands as diverse as Pearl Jam,  Bright Eyes, NIN and the Dixie Chicks are writing anti-Bush, anti-war songs  for a new, ultra-jaded generation.  

And, oh yes, speaking of good ol' MDMA  (Ecstasy), even drug culture is getting some new respect. Staid old Time mag  just ran a rather snide little story about the new studies being conducted by  Harvard and the National Institute of Mental Health into the astonishing  psycho-spiritual benefits of goodly entheogens such as LSD, psilocybin and  MDMA. Unfortunately, the piece basically backhands Timothy Leary and the  entire "excessive," "naive" drug culture of yore in favor of much more "sane"  and "careful" scientific analysis happening now, as if the only valid methods  for attaining knowledge and an understanding of spirit were through control  groups and clinical, mysticism-free examination. Please.  

Still, the fact that serious scientific  research into entheogens is being conducted even in the face of the most  anti-science, pro-pharmaceutical, ultraconservative presidential regime in  recent history is proof enough that all the hoary hippie mantras about  expanding the mind and touching God through drugs were onto something after  all (yes, duh). Tim Leary is probably smiling wildly right now -- though that  might be because of all the mushrooms he's been sharing with Kerouac and  Einstein and Mary Magdalene. Mmm, heaven.  

Of course, true hippie values mean  you're not really supposed to care about or attach to any of this, you don't  give a damn for the hollow ego stroke of being right all along, for slapping  the culture upside the head and saying, "See? Do you see? It was never about  the long hair and the folk music and Woodstock and taking so much acid you see  Jesus and Shiva and Buddha tongue kissing in a hammock on the Dog Star,  nimrods."  

It was, always and forever, about  connectedness. It was about how we are all in this together. It was about  resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and  it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we  can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for  alternative cultures, for each other. You know, all that typical hippie junk no one believes in anymore. Right?

May 2, 2007

This speech describes so well, our current situation. We must act to bring change in Iraq...x/f

Will we ever learn

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
In 1968, my father, running for President, addressed in a speech, the White
House's proposal for a troop surge in Vietnam. Robert Kennedy had initially
supported the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Forty years later, as Congress
and the White House debate the further escalation of yet another war that
has already claimed the lives of an astounding 640,000 Iraqis, killed 3,256
U.S. soldiers and wounded another 50,000, his words should have special
resonance to those of our political leaders who are still searching for the
right course in Iraq:

Robert Kennedy:
"I do not want--as I believe most Americans do not want--to sell out
American interests, to simply withdraw, to raise the white flag of
surrender. That would be unacceptable to us as a country and as a people.
But I am concerned--as I believe most Americans are concerned--that the
course we are following at the present time is deeply wrong. I am
concerned--as I believe most Americans are concerned--that we are acting as
if no other nations existed, against the judgment and desires of neutrals
and our historic allies alike. I am concerned--as I believe most Americans
are concerned--that our present course will not bring victory; will not
bring peace; will not stop the bloodshed; and will not advance the interests
of the United States or the cause of peace in the world. I am concerned
that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more
of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitterness and hatred on
every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of [civilians]
slaughtered; so they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: "They made a desert,
and called it peace." . . .

"The reversals of the last several months have led our military to ask for
more troops. This weekend, it was announced that some of them--a "moderate"
increase, it was said--would soon be sent. But isn't this exactly what we
have always done in the past? If we examine the history of this conflict, we
find the dismal story repeated time after time. Every time--at every
crisis--we have denied that anything was wrong; sent more troops; and issued
more confident communiques. Every time, we have been assured that this one
last step would bring victory. And every time, the predictions and promises
have failed and been forgotten, and the demand has been made again for just
one more step up the ladder. But all the escalations, all the last steps,
have brought us no closer to success than we were before. . . . And once
again the President tells us, as we have been told for twenty years, that
"we are going to win"; "victory" is coming. . . . It becoming more evident
with every passing day that the victories we achieve will only come at the
cost of the destruction for the nation we once hoped to help. . . .

"Let us have no misunderstanding. [They] are a brutal enemy indeed. Time and
time again, they have shown their willingness to sacrifice innocent
civilians, to engage in torture and murder and despicable terror to achieve
their ends. This is a war almost without rules or quarter. There can be no
easy moral answer to this war, no one-sided condemnation of American
actions. What we must ask ourselves is whether we have a right to bring so
much destruction to another land, without clear and convincing evidence that
this is what its people want. But that is precisely the evidence we do not
have. . . .

"The war, far from being the last critical test for the United States, is in
fact weakening our position in Asia and around the world, and eroding the
structure of international cooperation which has directly supported our
security for the past three decades. . . . All this bears directly and
heavily on the question of whether more troops should now be sent--and, if
more are sent, what their mission will be. We are entitled to ask--we are
required to ask--how many more men, how many more lives, how much more
destruction will be asked, to provide the military victory that is always
just around the corner, to pour into this bottomless pit of our dreams? But
this question the administration does not and cannot answer. It has no
answer--none but the ever-expanding use of military force and the lives of
our brave soldiers, in a conflict where military force has failed to solve
anything yet. . . .

"But the costs of the war's present course far outweigh anything we can
reasonably hope to gain by it, for ourselves or for the people of Vietnam.
It must be ended, and it can be ended, in a peace of brave men who have
fought each other with a terrible fury, each believing he and he alone was
in the right. We have prayed to different gods, and the prayers of neither
have been answered fully. Now, while there is still time for some of them to
be partly answered, now is the time to stop. . . .

"You are the people, as President Kennedy said, who have "the least ties to
the present and the greatest ties to the future." I urge you to learn the
harsh facts that lurk behind the mask of official illusion with which we
have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves. Our country is
in danger: not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our misguided
policies--and what they can do to the nation that Thomas Jefferson once told
us was the last, best hope of man. There is a contest on, not for the rule
of America, but for the heart of America. . . . I ask you to go forth and
work for new policies--work to change our direction--and thus restore our
place at the point of moral leadership, in our country, in our hearts, and
all around the world."

                           April 12, 2007

Like so many of KV's  admirers, I'll miss the comfort of his tweaked voice of common sense. Included at the end of this announcement is a BB interview he gave on the eve of the Iraq war which captures his straight talk about the absurdities of our present administration.

A moment of silence and a bow for a great American who will always be a friend to those who "feel" outside the box. You the man, Kurt Vonnegut ....x/f

    Kurt Vonnegut,
Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture,
Dies at 84
   By Dinitia Smith
    The New York Times

    Wednesday 11 April 2007

    Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

    His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Mr. Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.

    Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and '70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.

    Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?

    He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. "Mark Twain," Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, "Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage," "finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died."

    Not all Mr. Vonnegut's themes were metaphysical. With a blend of vernacular writing, science fiction, jokes and philosophy, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment.

    His novels - 14 in all - were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago "filled with bittersweet lies," a narrator says).

    The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut's life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. "The firebombing of Dresden," Mr. Vonnegut wrote, "was a work of art." It was, he added, "a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany."

    His experience in Dresden was the basis of "Slaughterhouse-Five," which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, "so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age."

    To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," summed up his philosophy:

    "Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.' "

    Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him "one of the most able of living American writers." Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.

    He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.

    With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.

    Mr. Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, a fourth-generation German-American and the youngest of three children. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. Mr. Vonnegut's brother, Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms.

    During the Depression, the elder Vonnegut went for long stretches without work, and Mrs. Vonnegut suffered from episodes of mental illness. "When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information," Mr. Vonnegut wrote. She committed suicide, an act that haunted her son for the rest of his life.

    He had, he said, a lifelong difficulty with women. He remembered an aunt once telling him, " 'All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.' "

    "My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside," he wrote.

    Mr. Vonnegut went east to attend Cornell University, but he enlisted in the Army before he could get a degree. The Army initially sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon) in Pittsburgh and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.

    In 1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and shortly saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly destroyed, he wandered behind enemy lines for several days until he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, the architectural jewel of Germany.

    Assigned by his captors to make vitamin supplements, he was working with other prisoners in an underground meat locker when British and American war planes started carpet bombing the city, creating a firestorm above him. The work detail saved his life.

    Afterward, he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.

    "The corpses, most of them in ordinary cellars, were so numerous and represented such a health hazard that they were cremated on huge funeral pyres, or by flamethrowers whose nozzles were thrust into the cellars, without being counted or identified," he wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death." When the war ended, Mr. Vonnegut returned to the United States and married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. The couple had three children: Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Mr. Vonnegut's sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other, she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts adopted their children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.

    In Chicago, Mr. Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. He also studied for a master's degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on "The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales." It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel "Cat's Cradle" as his thesis.)

    In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for the General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," to Collier's magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started an auto dealership.

    His first novel was "Player Piano," published in 1952. A satire on corporate life - the meetings, the pep talks, the cultivation of bosses - it also carries echoes of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." It concerns an engineer, Paul Proteus, who is employed by the Ilium Works, a company similar to General Electric. Proteus becomes the leader of a band of revolutionaries who destroy machines that they think are taking over the world.

    "Player Piano" was followed in 1959 by "The Sirens of Titan," a science fiction novel featuring the Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. In 1961 he published "Mother Night," involving an American writer awaiting trial in Israel on charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany. Like Mr. Vonnegut's other early novels, they were published as paperback originals. And like "Slaughterhouse-Five," in 1972, and a number of other Vonnegut novels, "Mother Night" was adapted for film, in 1996, starring Nick Nolte.

    In 1963, Mr. Vonnegut published "Cat's Cradle." Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes. The novel, which takes its title from an Eskimo game in which children try to snare the sun with string, is an autobiographical work about a family named Hoenikker. The narrator, an adherent of the religion Bokononism, is writing a book about the bombing of Hiroshima and comes to witness the destruction of the world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on contact, causes all water to freeze at room temperature.

    Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science fiction writer with "Slaughterhouse-Five." It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. "You know - we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves," an English colonel says in the book. "We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God - I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.' "

    As Mr. Vonnegut was, Billy is captured and assigned to manufacture vitamin supplements in an underground meat locker, where the prisoners take refuge from Allied bombing.

    In "Slaughterhouse-Five," Mr. Vonnegut introduced the recurring character of Kilgore Trout, his fictional alter ego. The novel also featured a signature Vonnegut phrase.

    "Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round," Mr. Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, "was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

    "Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes."

    One of many Zen-like words and phrases that run through Mr. Vonnegut's books, "so it goes" became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.

    "Slaughterhouse-Five" reached No.1 on best-seller lists, making Mr. Vonnegut a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough language and scenes of violence.

    After the book was published, Mr. Vonnegut went into severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.

    "The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem," he wrote. His son Mark also suffered a breakdown, in the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a book, "Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity."

    Forsaking novels, Mr. Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first effort, "Happy Birthday, Wanda June," opened Off Broadway in 1970 to mixed reviews. Around this time he separated from his wife, Jane, and moved to New York. (She remarried and died in 1986.)

    In 1979 Mr. Vonnegut married the photographer Jill Krementz. They have a daughter, Lily. They survive him, as do all his other children.

    Mr. Vonnegut returned to novels with "Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday" (1973), calling it a "tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast." This time his alter ego is Philboyd Sludge, who is writing a book about Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy auto dealer. Hoover has a breakdown after reading a novel written by Kilgore Trout, who reappears in this book, and begins to believe that everyone around him is a robot.

    In 1997, Mr. Vonnegut published "Timequake," a tale of the millennium in which a wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s. The book, based on an earlier failed novel of his, was, in his own words, "a stew" of plot summaries and autobiographical writings. Once again, Kilgore Trout is a character. "If I'd wasted my time creating characters," Mr. Vonnegut said in defense of his "recycling," "I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter."

    Though it was a bestseller, it also met with mixed reviews. "Having a novelist's free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride," R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time. But the novelist Valerie Sayers, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote: "The real pleasure lies in Vonnegut's transforming his continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a publishing world consumed with the furor over novel versus memoir."

    Mr. Vonnegut said in the prologue to "Timequake" that it would be his last novel. And so it was.

    His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, "A Man Without a Country." It, too, was a best seller.

    In concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called "Requiem," which has these closing lines:

    When the last living thing

    has died on account of us,

    how poetical it would be

    if Earth could say,

    in a voice floating up

    perhaps

    from the floor

    of the Grand Canyon,

    "It is done."

    People did not like it here.


Interview with Kurt Vonnegut

Author and WWII Veteran
By Joel Bleifuss | 1.27.03
In These Times

You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan wars,
Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war in Iraq. What
has changed, and what has remained the same?

One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what
continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place,
and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got
here. There were already all these games going on when I got here. ...
An apt motto for any polity anywhere, to put on its state seal or
currency or whatever, might be this quotation from the late baseball
manager Casey Stengel, who was addressing a team of losing
professional athletes: "Can't anybody here play this game?"
My daughter Lily, for an example close to home, who has just turned
20, finds herself-as does George W. Bush, himself a kid-an heir to a
shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an AIDS epidemic and to
nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and
elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment's notice to turn industrial
quantities of men, women and children into radioactive soot and bone
meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. And to the choice
between liberalism or conservatism and on and on.
What is radically new in 2003 is that my daughter, along with our
president and Saddam Hussein and on and on, has inherited technologies
whose byproducts, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the
whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of
any kind. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

Based on what you've read and seen in the media, what is not being
said in the mainstream press about President Bush's policies and the
impending war in Iraq?

That they are nonsense.
My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people are
beginning to despair. Do you think that we've lost reason to hope?
I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a
just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body
snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is
that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy,
Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable. And those now in charge of
the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history
or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka
"Christians," and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic
personalities, or "PPs."
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical
diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot.
The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey
Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the
suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They
cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and
WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining
their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure
as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them?
And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal
government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.
What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now
in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people,
they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they
cannot care what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that!
Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut
health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a
trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club
and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

                           April 10, 2007

The Unborn Mind
from the Buddha's Dhammapada


Live in joy,
In love,
Even among those who hate.

Live in joy,
In health,
Even among the afflicted.

Live in joy,
In peace,
Even among the troubled.

Live in joy,
Without possessions,
Like the shining ones.

The winner sows hatred
Because the loser suffers.
Let go of winning and losing
And find joy.

There is no fire like passion,
No crime like hatred,
No sorrow like separation,
No sickness like hunger,
And no joy like the joy of freedom.

Health, contentment and trust
Are your greatest possessions,
And freedom your greatest joy.

Look within,
Be still.
Free from fear and attachment,
Know the sweet joy of the way.

How joyful to look upon the awakened
And to keep company with the wise.

How long the road to the man
Who travels with a fool.
But whosoever follows those who follow The Way
Discovers his family, and is filled with joy.

Follow then the shining ones,
The wise, the awakened, the loving,
For they know how to work and forbear.

Follow them,
As the moon follows the path of the stars.

April 5, 2007

Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal

by Naomi Shihab Nye