Southern latitudes, Florida in particular, offer beauty, warm hospitality and friendly charm. Life on the gulf this time of year transcends mere relaxation. The warm breeze is a drug, the lush green landscape a comfortable down mattress. I can see living here and why it has drawn so many millions over the decades. We could be on the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages or the Black Sea in the time of Genghis Kahn. The vast majority of humans are near the salty breeze as they awake each day.
We’re in a gated community. Mexicans, Cubans and blacks tend to our needs. For that reason, I could not live here. Liberal guilt would ruin it for me.
We used to take two publications when I was growing up: the Saturday Evening Post, and Life Magazine. Both went under in the 70’s. The reason was waste product, an advertising concept. The magazines had broad appeal – there was as likely something in any issue for me, my parents and older brothers. That created a problem. The makers of Geritol, for instance, did not want to pay to advertise to readership that did not use their product.
It’s called segmentation. Advertisers insisted that magazines target audiences so that when they bought space, there was no waste. Hence, magazines like Gum Chewers Quarterly and Knot Tying Weekly Along with Cosmo and it’s endless ‘how to surprise him in bed’ lists and GQ for the self-imagined sophisticated male. Continue reading “The appeal of silence”→
“[The Cherokee] would go down to the water early in the morning, wade out waist deep, take the water of the river and throw it up over his head, and say, ‘Wash away any thoughts or feelings that may hinder me from being closer to my God. Take away any thoughts or feelings that may hinder me from being closer to all my brothers and sisters on the earth, and the animals of the earth.’ And they would wash themselves and cleanse themselves every morning, and they would walk out of the water.” [Adapted from Freeman Owle, “Going to Water.”]
Those words are posted on an information sign on the Oconaluftee River near Cherokee, outside Great Smoky Mountain National Park. I found them moving.
In comments below the previous post we were discussing the propaganda that we swim in daily here in the land of the blind, and I remember Jacques Ellul wrote about the “illusion of progress.” We have this notion that life is getting better. We have better aircraft, phones, Internet, interstate Highways, GPS systems, all due to the Department of Defense, an Orwellian euphemism. That government agency controls our technology, and for so long as that technology gives them an advantage over enemies, real and make believe, it is kept under wraps. When the advantage is gone it is given over to the private sector.
War is progress.
That image of a man wading into a river, cleansing his body and mind in preparation for a new day – we have surely regressed. What more is there to life than to exist in peace and in nature and among our fellow humans?
USA Today (similar to “Pravda,” or an official American propaganda outlet), says
Crimea government called fake: Putin decries Ukraine’s leadership as illegitimate, but analysts say he’s got it backward.
The “analysts” are never identified, but I think I’ve got it figured out. They are deep in the bowels of State or the Executive, and are unidentified because that’s how we do “news” in the crazy imperialist country. Anonymous sources make it up, doe-eyed stenographers repeat it, their only job to make it sound officious.
Meanwhile, there is still no hint anywhere in any US propaganda outlet of the facts on the ground: The Russians did not “invade” Crimea. Troops have been there for decades, along with military hardware. It is all by agreement. Additionally, the coup d’état was carried out by neo-Nazi elements within Ukraine, long supported by CIA through NED. CIA itself was a blending of SS and OSS after World War II, given Carte Blanche by a doe-eyed Harry Truman, who would later call it his greatest mistake.
It’s ugly, but true, and so far from official US propaganda, and the doe-eyed attitudes of even sentient Americans, that it seems bizarre. But Bizarroworld is really USA today. That’s how crazy we are.
The US media, the most submissive in the industrial world, is simply lying about Ukraine, and in bold. But turn to the sports section – there they are very good, even burrowing and defiant. There we get actual reporting, even some journalism.
We are moving slowly through North Carolina today, on our way to Spartanburg, SC, eventually to the coast, but no timetable. We spent yesterday in Smoky Mountain National Park. It’s a good time to be there, just as with Yellowstone in spring. There are few tourists other than us.
I had heard of the Trail of Tears, when the US government drove the Cherokee off their land and over to Oklahoma. 4,000 died on that journey, perhaps in despair. What we took from them is a charming land of low, forested hills and mountain streams. Game was abundant, and life, as wilderness life goes, was easy.
We wandered around an old farm this morning, all of the out buildings still preserved. A family could live here on pigs and corn. It was hard work, and not much surplus went to market. It was perhaps nothing like Eastern Montana, where weather always held potential disaster in store. This land gives reason for optimism, and yields a different people.
And the people are nice – charming actually. Bearded men with nasal tone hold your attention, as it takes a little time just to drawl out short sentences. We spent fifteen minutes with Barry Higgs, visitor center guy. His family goes back to the 1700’s. He wants to get out west and see Montana and Colorado. His dad used to go to Twin Bridges every year to fish. I wanted to tell him not to bother, that he’ got is all here, but could not get a word in between his.
I just picked up the Un-Civil War, one of those ‘teacher never told you’ books. Should be fun, and who knows what is true? The events in the Ukraine are not even a week old, and all we got was lies. Can the Civil War be different?
So let’s finish here. Much ground to cover. This area is so much fun to get to know. Even just passing through, I am filled with warmth. It is a place that engenders a fondness that I will take home with me. Just thinking of it will bring back lovely memories. We must return someday.
Off on a new adventure tomorrow, this time the Southeast. We have an aunt and uncle south of Tampa, so we decided to fly into Atlanta and rent a car and just wander, their home the final destination. The trip will include Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, and finally, Florida and Bonita Springs.
Years ago we took our family (our five kids ranged in age from 13 on down) on a cross-country trip from Montana to Long Island. Going there I felt a need to schedule, to have a booked motel at every stop. One of those stops was Monroeville, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh. My stereotype was steel mills, air pollution and devastated landscapes. We arrived late in the day, and the last part of the journey was through the beautiful forests of Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is part of that, a beautiful city set in rolling hills.
The trip back was delightful – until we got to North Dakota and Eastern Montana, of course. (OK – I might have had a temper tantrum in the Eisenhower Expressway around Chicago.) We had learned how to travel with kids. Each morning we would get up very early, and I carried them one-by-one to the Dodge B300 van, the Blue Zoo. I had built a platform in the back so that between that and the seats there was enough flat space to accommodate all five of them asleep and still have a hold underneath for luggage. It was not safe, I know. One-by-one as they awoke we had an ice cold juice waiting for them, so that it would be a pleasant memory. Then we would stop for a late breakfast. I am not sure how pleasant those memories are for the kids, but we tried to make travel less grueling. In late afternoon, say 4 or 5 PM, we got off the road and found a motel with a swimming pool, and let them go to release all of their pent-up energies.
So the trip, the fact that we traveled, changed me and the way that I looked at Pittsburgh and the way that we should accommodate kids as we force them to sit in a small space for long periods of time.
(New Jersey was just as I imagined, a place that one has to endure on the way to somewhere else.)
It is always interesting to travel, to have formed notions about places and then to learn that those places are not at all what we imagine. In doing so, we open our eyes and ears and hearts. I think Mark Twain had something to say about that too.
I said something nasty to Polish Wolf the other day, and that’s OK because he’s nasty to me in turn. The only way to avoid nastiness with him is to give him the respect he thinks he’s due. He’s young and has many years to ripen, so for now I’ll just repeat the nasty statement: “There seems to be a high degree of correlation in this country between self-proclaimed expertise and incuriosity.”
This came to mind last night when I again said something I regret, this time to my son. I immediately took my comment down off of Facebook, but too late. It went out over the tubes. He is young too and has many years to ripen, and him I like quite a bit. So the comment sticks in my craw as a piece of advice that I could have used (but been too dense to grasp) at any time in my life. Wish I’d just shut up.
He put up brief comment about the events in the Ukraine, and there followed another comment from a young friend of his who talked about how awful that the Soviets were invading. I chimed in that it appeared to me that Ukraine had been invaded by the EU. The friend advised me that there were no EU uniforms there. I said oops – my bad. I did not know that invaders always wore uniforms. And my son said that it was off-topic anyway, and that there is lots of stuff there that can’t be knowed. And that’s when I dropped the rich morsel on him. I said “You could try being curious.”
Everything there is knowable. Everything going on now in Egypt and Venezuela is knowable. It’s just history playing out. CIA, MI6, NATO and Mossad have unimaginable resources and can make large events happen, and our incurious news media reports all of it as if it is what it appears to be. But it’s not. Ukraine is what it always has been – a buffer for the Russians against invading western forces. The whole of the World War II played out as just another invasion of Russia. Had not Neville Chamberlain and certain British and American factions wanted that invasion, a certain angry maniacal Austrian would have been stopped early in his tracks.
Ukraine is a breadbasket, and a strategically located country from which force can be projected. Whichever imperial power controls Ukraine has hegemonic power over other places, most notably, the Balkans. It’s part of the great game, and sad for them that lives there to be in a place that imperial powers are concerned about. Like the poor schmucks in Afghanistan.
How do I know this? How can this not be known? I don’t want to brag, but I have many years of curiosity behind me, and these questions are long answered in my mind. These events are easy to understand. It doesn’t do me any good to be the only one I know* who understands them, so all my years of burrowing amount to no useful purpose. That’s why this blog is taking a different tack, on to more important things.
I just wish I knew what those things were.
_________________
*Oops! SK, SW – just poor wording. There are at least three of us.
Advertising has gotten totally out of hand on this blog, and I have decided to upgrade to get rid of it. I don’t know the details but assume that with purchase of the domain, readers will automatically be linked from the old address.
Bill Hicks summed it up nicely. Lizard first showed me this performance, Dead-on. Google has gotten so bad that I don’t use it anymore – I cannot get past the paid links. And it’s funny, as each one who pays is guaranteed front page visibility, which cannot be.
In regular venues, I cannot move the cursor over the screen without the annoying pop-ups. They have gotten around pop-up blocking by making them part of the web page. Perhaps the worst is the pre-roll where we are forced to sit through an ad before seeing a video. The worst I ever saw was at a Cincinnati Reds site where a man with a baton backed by noise appeared from the left and danced across the screen hawking cars. That was a browser closer.
The Internet started out a quiet place. Advertisers have done everything in their power to destroy it. They first hit us with pop-ups. Then pre-rolls, and now embedded pop-ups. Spyware tracks our buying behavior. Parasite software sneaks on and asks you to buy their product in our lower right screens, without us even knowing how they got there. I have spent now over two hours removing parasite ads from this computer, a new one. Most recent was a box saying it was time to upgrade my “real player” at one time a real product. It wasn’t that at all. It was parasite programs, and it took a long time to get the bastards off.
Most recently, a bar full of ads appears on this blog screen at the bottom with the slightest maneuver of the mouse on the screen. That was my last straw.
They are ruining the Internet just as they ruined commercial TV and AM radio. What’s that you say? Without the ads we don’t get the content? I DON’T CARE. Without the ad-supported content, something better will come along. PBS and NPR, for all their amazing crap news, offer cultural programming that has few rivals. (Our NPR outlet down here in Denver, by the way, runs advertising all day long. They just don’t call it that.)
Advertising is the curse of modern life. Advertisers have to be annoying and intrusive, subversive, loud and repetitive. They have to get our attention.
Thank you, free market, for destroying our serenity, privacy and sanity with your ads. You really, really suck.
I was deeply moved last night hearing the Russians belt out their national anthem. It is a powerful song with mood shifts, somber, serious, glorious and ebullient. Our American anthem is so stiff and requires too much vocal range for ordinary people. It would not even make the top 1000, much less top 40 in the twentieth century. It’s a crappy piece of music. We might as well sing the Darth Vader’s theme from Star Wars … bump bump bum dump da dum dump da dum …
Here in Colorado, we have “Rocky Mountain High.” If you ever want a shiver in your spine and a tear in your eye, stand in an auditorium and sing that song at the top of your lungs with everyone else. THAT is an anthem. THAT is what it should be – a glorious celebration of people and place.
Some people want our anthem to be “America the Beautiful.” If we have to choose between only two, I’ll take that one. But Paul Simon’s American Tune is more realistic:
I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
Or driven to its knees
Oh, but it’s all right, it’s all right
For lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
We’re traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong.
My goodness! Look – just look! – at the concern on their faces. It will go away when the cameras leave.Back when Marc Racicot was governor of Montana, Libby and cancer were beeping on public radar. Since Racicot was from that area, he was thought to have special concerns.
Piece of Mindful 