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 7 Apr 2007 @ 11:05
Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.
---Sogyal Rinpoche
Tu Fu comes from a saner, older, more secular culture than Homer, and it is not a new discovery with him that the gods, the abstractions, the forces of nature, are frivolous, lewd, vicious, quarrelsome, and cruel, and only men's steadfastness, love, magnanimity, calmness, and compassion redeem the night-bound world.
---Kenneth Rexroth
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
---Walker Percy
Photo: [link]
I first became aware of the chief weapon of the new conservative around 1960. The weapon is mockery and it was used effectively against my friends and me at Bates College. The school had a requirement to attend chapel a few times a week for programs of a non-religious character---but it was a chapel of vaguely Christian architecture. You also had to take a couple religion courses and fees were collected from all students to support the Christian Association. The CA had a locked bulletin board, to which I had a key and where I used to post rather leftist material.
The emerging leaders of culture war attacked all of this. Their models and mentors appeared to be Ayn Rand and William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley particularly was on television all the time debating liberals. His method of discourse always was a sneering dismantling of the bleeding heart of concern for the downtrodden. If you are lazy and stupid you should expect to be trod upon in this life. I remember 2 hours of excruciating embarrassment as Buckley mocked out James Baldwin for his passion on civil rights. I recall Buckley concluded one of his "Firing Lines" by warning the audience America is being watched on all sides by greedy eyes in faces "upon which there are no smiles." Mockery was established firmly upon a foundation of fear.
When questions arose surrounding the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the phrase "conspiracy theorists" showed up. We learn there always will be unanswerable questions about such events carried out by lone nutcases, and if you won't accept that reality you will be mocked. Questions about 9/11 and the Twin Towers? Same deal. We don't have time for this stuff: we must put it behind us and move forward. Weapons of mass destruction. A mushroom cloud could result if we delay our preemptive war. The Christian right delivered Shock And Awe, and there was talk of Judgment Day in the Cradle of Civilization. (At this time of year, one wonders why Jesus didn't move preemptively against Judas.) More >
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 4 Apr 2007 @ 09:58
The squeaking of the pump sounds as necessary as the music of the spheres.
---Henry David Thoreau
Do not recite sutras. Do not make portraits of me. Just bury my body in the back mountains. It is enough that you cover me with earth.
---Takuan's final wishes to his students
How could the drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
---Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Photo by Matt Taibbi of tattoo on the foot of Sgt. Stephen Wilkerson, Baghdad 2006
I once heard a friend make a case for oil and its markets having been the fundamental cause of all the wars of the past century. I had begun the conversation, I guess, by proclaiming loudly the need for conservation of the resource. My friend replied, "The sooner the earth runs out of oil the better!" I was amazed to hear this, and it was then he launched his theory.
At this hour Tony Blair continues his call for "direct" negotiation between Britain and Iran over UK sailors picked up for prowling around some ocean borderlines. [link] Yesterday he said he'd give the process another couple days before matters become "fairly critical", whatever that means. Iran has replied they're glad to talk...but at the same time we have these curious rumors floating via "Russian intelligence" that the US is ready to let fly with the missiles on Friday (or thereabouts). [link]
Are we poised for another "regime change"? Halliburton has moved its headquarters to Dubai, perhaps so trade deals for oil can be accomplished with Iran whether there's peace or war. I believe the United States has not had relations with Iran in about 25 years, and Halliburton can't do deals with them from here. If oil is the deal and soldiers are needed to secure the wells for Exxon/Mobil, time is of the essence. But should we be doing better at our occupations...despite all the claims of progress by Madman McCain and the Bushie loyalists?
The last few days I've been catching up with an article from last summer in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi. The long piece is called Fort Apache, Iraq, and it took me some days to read it. The writing is intense and Taibbi often launches off into a kind of loony poetry that made me stop and think a lot. Last May he spent some days tooling around the bloody roads of Iraq in a Humvee with a group of National Guardsmen from Oklahoma, and followed that up with 3 days locked in a jail cell in Abu Ghraib. Out of these experiences he fashioned this article that expresses vividly for me just what it's like for us Yanks to be over there...and how we look. This isn't the first time Matt Taibbi has put himself into very radical situations for the sake of journalistic truth. Someone has put up a Wikipedia article about him that gives his history along with a ton of links. [link] For our purpose today I'll select some excerpts from Fort Apache, Iraq, and give you the online link to the whole thing. More >
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 25 Mar 2007 @ 10:15
Painting of Bill Moyers by Robert Shetterly
[link]
Thomas Jefferson said the only justification for mandatory public education is to teach children their rights, and how to defend those rights. We need lots and lots of us addressing students of all ages, to let them know their rights, and that we’re sorry we’re handing over the mess the country and the world is in.
---christie svane
You can’t lay bricks on top of a crumbling system. It must be torn down first. If the system had been healthy to begin with, we would never have come to where we find ourselves now. I strongly disagree with most American’s premise of what they think America stands for. It never was all it was cracked up to be. It must be made better if it is to rise from the ashes of tyranny. I doubt Americans have the grit for the work that must be done to re-invent America in the image of truth.
---imors
like so many others i have wanted more than anything to make a real and true picture of our beautiful world
and for its own sake but not its own sake alone
i confess right here that ive wanted to correct or possibly infect the mind of whoever crossed paths with my poem
i mean i look around these days - all days really
its easy to see the cars on the freeway and the shopping malls spread under the rise of the moon and feel doomed.
anything else is a sucker punch.
anything else is a refusal to see, ive said, and more than once, and meant it, and do - even right now - do you see?
---maddk
The sayings that introduce this post are comments at CommonDreams.org in reply to a talk given at Occidental College last month by Bill Moyers. At the moment there are 35 such comments since Thursday when CommonDreams put up the speech. Rarely have I seen Internet folk so thoughtful and inspired. Mr. Moyers has given a lot of addresses around the country since he retired from his weekly program on Public Broadcasting, and they all are worth seeking out urgently. Many people are so moved they call upon him to run for President...but he won't. He believes in his work as fearless spokesperson for a Free Press, and it is as journalist that he delivers A Time For Anger, A Call To Action. As in the time of Tom Paine, here are words to be published and posted at every site, to be handed from person to person. It is time again for Americans to shake off our lethargy, our complacency, our hopelessness. Here Bill Moyers helps us with that work. More >
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 23 Mar 2007 @ 11:39
When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
---Alan Watts
Once Fa-yen was asked, "What is the first principle?"
He answered: "If I should tell you, it would become the second principle."
---Zen mondo
When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird.
---John James Audubon
The legendary Phil Mattson
If you've Googled in looking for a message board, this ain't it...but please read on. A few months ago I innocently chronicled a tribute to a vocal teacher whose existence gradually had become known to me over a period of about 20 years. I had found an LP in a bin of remaindered items and I was attracted to the songs the group was doing, so I risked a few bucks to hear what was going on. The disc by The PM Singers became a favorite immediately. At the time I thought "PM" referred to evening or nighttime or something like that, but recently I learned they stood for Phil Mattson who played keyboard on the date and did the arrangements. I started researching and found this man's influence all over the place among vocal groups and choirs, so I wrote the piece and posted it a few places.
[link]
[link]
and especially at a Hi-Lo's forum where I thought it might attract some interest...but it didn't.
[link]
But some former students found it at NewCiv, maybe because of good relations between the webmaster and Google. Because of the traffic at the article and the interest they have in finding each other and connecting, I'm suggesting somebody please set up a message board for Phil and all his students on the Internet. The last week or 2 I set about to answer requests to find a couple of these folks, and sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's not...but always interesting, as perhaps you'll see. More >
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 18 Mar 2007 @ 10:46
I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.
---Henry David Thoreau
Every morning I awaken torn between the desire to save the world and the inclination to savor it.
---E.B. White
A zendo is not a place for bliss and relaxation. It is a furnace room for the combustion of our delusion. What tools do we need to use? Only one. We've all heard it, yet we use it very seldom. It is called "attention."
---Charlotte Joko Beck
I wouldn't be surprised if more Internet browsers than I found ourselves clicking around the same sites for the first time yesterday. One is www.talkingpointsmemo.com and the other, associated with it, is www.tpmmuckraker.com . My wife gave me the heads-up by sending me their "Canned US Attorney Timeline," which I promptly linked in a comment at another entry [link] . Impressed and curious, I started looking around the site, and before long found myself at the adjoining muckraker blog.
Also yesterday the Los Angeles Times ran a column about these guys, and I think the writing is worthy to share. The article's author is Terry McDermott, who lives in Iowa I think, but is a regular correspondent for the LA Times. A couple years ago he wrote a book, and when Terry Gross interviewed him for NPR's Fresh Air, here's how she led off~~~
"Fresh Air from WHYY, May 4, 2005 · McDermott, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times was skeptical of the way the Sept. 11 hijackers were portrayed. So he traveled to 22 countries to research their identities, motives and life circumstances.
"He found that they weren't deeply disturbed. They came from intact families, most were middle-class, few were deeply religious, and none were (sic) abused or estranged. His new book is Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It." [link]
The book still is at Amazon [link] but the essay I'm talking about is a tribute to serious bloggers everywhere. I'll preserve it right now~~~ More >
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I don't know about you, but sometimes I work a long time, cumulatively for hours, on comments I make on these News Logs. I plan to edit this Log regularly and delete things. Before I do that, I want to assure you, I shall notify each commentator of such an amendment so you may have time to copy anything you wish to save and paste somewhere else. Create your own News Log in your profile. |
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