Africans’ Message to Imperialism: “We Are Not Your Flunkies!”

So, good friend, Madu, who I met decades ago, at UT-El Paso. He was coming through buildings where part-time English faculty had offices. That big smile, that large voice, and an open hand. He was working the used/discount book gig: going to colleges to get books from faculty and bookstores that might have been extra copies from the respective publishers called review copies.

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So, part-time faculty like myself, in the 1980s, would order tons of these reviewer’s copies of grammar, lit, and survey collections. Then fellows like Madu might come by with hard cold cash to buy them up.

The old days when students could find alternative prices (lower) than what college bookstores would charge. Madu has that service.

We talked, and his Nigerian love, his Nigerian spirit, the fact he was in Houston, with a wife and three children, all of that, made the chats open and real. I had just had a baby girl, so we talked about her.

Then politics, Africa, my own activism around Central America, the US-Mexico border, the environment, twin plants, militarization of campuses and the border, and my own work trying to unionize part-time exploited faculty.

Global politics. Nigeria, Africa, Diasporas, evil US-backed dictators, colonialism, post-colonialism, the trauma, the long-term biopiracy of Africa, the theft of resources, and alas, imagine, 30 years later, almost, and African countries are in the grips of AFRICOM, the US vassals, the exploiters, the mining, ag, and oil thieves. Until, 2022, many are becoming failed states, famines, the entire world of data mining, Zuckerberg encircling the continent with his Metaverse, and on and on. The story of United Fruit Company, Coca Cola, Monsanto, Big Pharma, Hearts and Minds USA special forces, and proxy wars and Nationa ENdowmenr for Democracy/CIA fomenting hell.

Oh, this devil USA:

Phoenix Express 2021, the AFRICOM-sponsored military exercise involving 13 countries in the Mediterranean Sea region, concluded last week. While its stated aim was to combat “irregular migration” and trafficking, the U.S. record in the region indicates more nefarious interests. “AFRICOM military’s exercise: The art of creating new pretexts for propagating U.S. interests” (source)

Go to MR Online, and then put in AFRICOM. Or, AFRICOM and Nigeria, or pick your country. Mark my words: Everything, I say EVERYTHING, tied to the USA and UK and EU when involving African nations now, well, pure evil:

Black Alliance for Peace?

Nigeria has imperial and neocolonial trappings it must acknowledge and vehemently reject. This includes surrendering decision making about financial and credit facilities or political organization to the West, which has a significant impact on the actions of those who take political office in the country. The United States is an imperial power that operates through its neo-colonial subjects and its control over imperialist structures, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as through its control over the politicians in office.

Nigerian sovereignty is reduced to mere “flag independence” because of U.S. external-policy interference and economic control. This allows the space for Nigerian elites to engage in wrongdoing—whether by corruption, nepotism or human-rights abuses. We must contextualize these instances in terms of how Western corporations and governments often enable (and encourage) such actions to preserve lucrative economic arrangements.

General elections will be held in Nigeria on February 25 to elect the president and vice president, as well as members of the Senate and House of Representatives. These elections will take place amid an unprecedented state of general crisis. Any politician or party coming into power will have to contend with an ongoing capitalist crisis. The response of any neo-colonial government is likely to  be to tighten fiscal consolidation on behalf of big business. The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and its U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN) must support the antithesis of neo-colonial governance, which are self-determination and bottom-up, participatory democratic processes. (source)

This is recent, as in Oct. 2021:

Please join us for the launch of the international month of action by attending a webinar on October 1st, titled “AFRICOM at 13: Building the Popular Movement for Demilitarization and Anti-Imperialism in Africa.” Speakers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, and the African diaspora will discuss AFRICOM and what we can do to expel imperialist forces from the continent. Following the webinar, events will take place throughout October organized by various organizations on the African continent, in the U.S., and around the world to demand an end to the U.S. and western invasion and occupation of Africa.

BAP makes the following demands in the U.S. Out of Africa!: Shut Down AFRICOM campaign:

• The complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Africa,
• The demilitarization of the African continent,
• The closure of U.S. bases throughout the world, and
• That the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) oppose U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and conduct hearings on AFRICOM’s impact on the African continent, with the full participation of members of U.S. and African civil society.

---

Written by Tunde Osazua, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace’s Africa Team and the coordinator of the U.S. Out of Africa Network.

So, I was on Madu’s radio show, and he has run for Senate in Nigeria, and he wants to run for president. However, as he clearly states: “You have to have millions of dollars and militias to buy the votes.”

LINK.

This is his organization:

Here’s a statement from Madu:

Not rising up by Nigerians from within Nigeria and around the world beyond ethnic, regional, religious and partisan political boundaries to save Nigeria from the hands of her mostly visionless, ignorant, insensitive, inhumane, squandermanic and most painfully, corrupt and morally bankrupt drivers of government at all levels whose actions have significantly weakened her sovereignty and territorial integrity, and made her peoples so poor and vulnerable , is a sin against God and a grave infraction against humanity for which history and unborn generations of Nigerians will judge us all harshly if we fail today to act unconditionally to save the country from an imminent collapse.

….Smart Madu Ajaja

This is a serious and long-term project, the decolonizing of the world, including all those countries’ economies, the land, the people, the cultures and the individuals:

This Special Issue aims to explore the complex and contested relationship between trauma studies and postcolonial criticism, focusing on the ongoing project to create a decolonized trauma theory that attends to and accounts for the suffering of minority groups and non-Western cultures, broadly defined as cultures beyond Western Europe and North America. The issue builds on the insights of, inter alia, Stef Craps’s book, Postcolonial Witnessing, and responds to his challenge to interrogate and move beyond a Eurocentric trauma paradigm. Authors were invited to submit papers on the theorization and representation of any aspect of postcolonial, non-Western and/or minority cultural trauma with a focus predominately, but not exclusively, on literature. (Source= Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism … 200+ pages!)

I talked with Madu on his radio show, and below, the show. I do cover a lot of philosophical territory, and alas, this is about Madu and his love of his country and how quickly the country of his birth has spiraled into a country of selling people as slaves, kidnapping people for organs, murder, rape, theft.

So under the cover of counterterrorism, AFRICOM is beefing up Nigeria’s military to ensure the free flow of oil to the West, and using the country as a proxy against China’s influence on the continent. And that is the issue, too, that Madu is not happy with — his country being exploited by anyone, including China. I explained to him that the USA has the military bases, the guns, and China has the contracts, the builders. In fact, Madu is spiritually exasperated at how his own countrymen turn against their own countrymen, and how there is a overlay of trauma and laziness and desperation and inflicted PTSD, including the post-colonial trauma referenced above.

USA is like a storm of ticks, locusts, mosquitos, viruses, as the syphilitic notions of Neocon and Neoliberal anti-diplomacy hits country after country like disease. A plague.

The greatest threat looming over our planet, the hegemonistic pretentions of the American Empire, are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger, and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads.

–Hugo Chavez

The United States Military is arguably the largest force of ecological devastation the world has ever known.

–Xoài Pham

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill it or betray it.

–Frantz Fanon (source)

William Blum wrote about the illegality of the USA’s direct and indirect bombing and invasions.

Here, a bit of an update:

The Death Toll of U.S. Imperialism Since World War 2

A critical disclaimer: Figures relating to the death toll of U.S. Imperialism are often grossly underestimated due to the U.S. government’s lack of transparency and often purposeful coverup and miscounts of death tolls. In some cases, this can lead to ranges of figures that include millions of human lives–as in the figure for Indonesia below with estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people. We have tried to provide the upward ranges in these cases since we suspect the upward ranges to be more accurate if not still significantly underestimated. These figures were obtained from multiple sources including but not limited to indigenous scholar Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology as well as Countercurrents’ article Deaths in Other Nations Since WWII Due to U.S. Interventions (please note that use of Countercurrents’ statistics isn’t an endorsement of the site’s politics).

• Afghanistan: at least 176,000 people
• Bosnia: 20,000 to 30,000 people
• Bosnia and Krajina: 250,000 people
• Cambodia: 2-3 million people
• Chad: 40,000 people and as many as 200,000 tortured
• Chile: 10,000 people (the U.S. sponsored Pinochet coup in Chile)
• Colombia: 60,000 people
• Congo: 10 million people (Belgian imperialism supported by U.S. corporations and the U.S. sponsored assassination of Patrice Lumumba)
• Croatia: 15,000 people
• Cuba: 1,800 people
• Dominican Republic: at least 3,000 people
• East Timor: 200,000 people
• El Salvador: More than 75,000 people (U.S. support of the Salvadoran oligarchy and death squads)
• Greece: More than 50,000 people
• Grenada: 277 people
• Guatemala: 140,000 to 200,000 people killed or forcefully disappeared (U.S. support of the Guatemalan junta)
• Haiti: 100,000 people
• Honduras: hundreds of people (CIA supported Battalion kidnapped, tortured and killed at least 316 people)
• Indonesia: Estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people
• Iran: 262,000 people
• Iraq: 2.4 million people in Iraq war, 576, 000 Iraqi children by U.S. sanctions, and over 100,000 people in Gulf War
• Japan: 2.6-3.1 million people
• Korea: 5 million people
• Kosovo: 500 to 5,000
• Laos: 50,000 people
• Libya: at least 2500 people
• Nicaragua: at least 30,000 people (U.S. backed Contras’ destabilization of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua)
• Operation Condor: at least 10,000 people (By governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. U.S. govt/CIA coordinated training on torture, technical support, and supplied military aid to the Juntas)
• Pakistan: at least 1.5 million people
• Palestine: estimated more than 200,000 people killed by military but this does not include death from blockade/siege/settler violence
• Panama: between 500 and 4000 people
• Philippines: over 100,000 people executed or disappeared
• Puerto Rico: 4,645-8,000 people
• Somalia: at least 2,000 people
• Sudan: 2 million people
• Syria: at least 350,000 people
• Vietnam: 3 million people
• Yemen: over 377,000 people
• Yugoslavia: 107,000 people (Source: The Mapping Project is a multi-generational collective of activists and organizers in the Boston area who are deeply engaged in Palestine solidarity / BDS work. For over a year, we’ve been tracing Greater Boston’s networks of support for the colonization of Palestine–and how these networks participate in other forms of oppression, from policing to U.S. imperialism to medical apartheid and privatization.)

Madu and most activist Nigerians know these facts. Big global facts. The vices the United States of America has put the world in. The dirty Empire. The global cop. And, so, Nigerians in the USA number around two million, with a few hundred thousand. Now, of course, off camera, I repeated to Madu that most Americans, oh, 90 percent of the 355 million currently residing (most illegally) here do not care about Black, Africans, Chinese, and again one American is worth a million Nigerians. It is a juggling act, being part of the Diapora, and Madu is a nurse, and he like I said ran for Senate, and lost, and he has been inspired by some youth, but again, youth are being colonized by the ticks of data. Read below the YouTube window.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/LDcxwJug-GA?start=3s&rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

So, Alison McDowell at Wrench in the Gears, and then Silicon Icarus and others are talking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the next colonialization of Africa. Coltan and gold may be like gold to the Wall Streeters and Transnationalists, and water and food and good land may be like platinum to the same group of thieves, but data is worth its gigbytes/terrabytes in emeralds. “French Imperialism vs. Crypto Colonialism: The Central African Republic Experiment” and “Blockchain Technology & Coercive Surveillance of the Global South” both by Sebs Solomon

So, Madu, and great honorable youth in Nigeria who want to have a free, open, clean, sustainable, cultural-centric, food security, self-imposing, country of healthy bodies, minds and ecosystems, I am sorry to report the devils wear skinny jeans, and many come to the USA from India with work permits to work and live in Seattle/Redmond to work for Microsoft/Google/Facebook and all the other devils helping put these systems in place:

At the same time, SingularityNET partnered with UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education (IBE) to establish a new curriculum for children and teens, with an emphasis on emerging technology to prepare the youth for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. According to UNICEF:

There will never be enough money allocated in the budget, qualified teachers, or places in schools for the population we have; therefore, emerging technologies like Virtual Reality allow us to leapfrog these problems and offer the hope of more affordable, scalable and better quality education.

It is striking to read that UNICEF doesn’t believe there will ever be enough money to help all of the children in the world receive a traditional, classroom, education; therefore, it’s better to invest and scale Virtual Reality education — a rather pessimistic take from the “children’s fund” arm of the UN. UNICEF Innovation Fund, has virtual reality education programs in Chile, India, Nigeria, and Ghana. In Ghana, they noted there are “challenges to accessing the necessary teaching and learning resources for students to receive quality education; which is compounded by the lack of necessary and up-to-date education materials, huge class sizes and the lack of necessary infrastructural facilities.” (source)

How many more battlefields shall honorable people like Madu enter into with no money, no militias and the kings of capital weilding more powerful digital bombs than hydrogen bombs?

For a rabbit hole or warren, go to: Silicon Icarus and see Alison McDowell’s work on the following: Alison McDowell. Or over at her blog: Wrench in the Gears. She’s expending lifetime hours looking into this evil web of Davos, WEF, the billionaires’ club, the taking over of humanity through transhumanism, blockchain, Singularity, and all the other topics the mainstream and leftstream media and blogs just won’t tackle.

• Blockchain
• Gamification
• Genomics
• Impact Finance
• Smart Cities
• Biosecurity State

This is what the Fourth Industrialization devils want for all children on earth (minus their kids and their sychophants’ kids). Soylent Green be damned!

Facebook for Madu Ajaja!

The tiredness of 10 Million Wole Soyinka will Not stop Nigeria from moving forward beyond its darkness of today…

“I gave this warning before the 2023 election in Nigeria and majority of Nigerians listened and voted overwhelmingly for Peter Obi as their president and so, for a terrorist-friendly Muhammadu Buhari to use an INEC chaired by his tribesman, Mahmoud Yakubu with a specific instruction to criminally, illegally and unconstitutionally return Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a fraudster and a US-indicted drug Baron as President-elect against the provisions of the electoral Act which he signed and with the backing of the DSS, Police and the Nigerian Army the command and control infrastructures of all which are in the hands of some of his fellow tribesmen is an affront on Nigeria and all Nigerians including Professor Wole Soyinka who MUST rise up unconditionally as patriots in defense of the sovereignty, integrity and the national security and unity of Nigeria”.

…Smart Madu Ajaja

Speaking of South Africa now, and Russia and China advancing diplomacy, not gun boat Rules Based America dis-Order,

South Africa’s participation in military drills with Russia and China is an indication that the global south are not taking orders from Washington. African nations should continue their tradition as non-aligned states.

In a remarkable display of independence, South Africa defied NATO on February 24th when it conducted naval drills with Russia and China on the first anniversary of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Writer and analyst Steven Gruzd, sensing the anger of the imperialists, speculates: “I don’t think Western nations are going to let this one slide.”

But to date, South Africa has not been intimidated. Obbey Mabena, a veteran of the ANC’s armed wing, while not speaking for the South African government, told CNN: “By default, we are on the side of Russia. And to us Ukraine [is] what we call a sell-out. It is selling out to the west,”

[Photo: South African, Russian and Chinese officials at Armed Forces Day in Richards Bay, South Africa, February 21 2023. (Photo: Themba Hadebe KDOW.biz new)]

Paul Haeder’s been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul’s book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here’s his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul’s website.

This article was posted on Sunday, June 12th, 2022 at 12:58pm and is filed under Africa, Children/Youth, Nigeria, Slavery, Social media, Surveillance, Technology, Totalitarianism, United Nations.

National Victims Rights Awareness week end of April

The Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) currently administers 19 grant programs authorized by the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994 and subsequent legislation.

Prosecutors’ Domestic Violence Handbook

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I’ve been assisting a friend through the legal system, the so-called criminal justice system here in Lincoln County.

It’s a domestic violence case, and while the husband is still in county jail, and while my friend has filed for divorce and is sticking it out by appearing at several court hearings – the divorce, the criminal case and a restraining order — she still feels like the victim

Lucky for me and her, I have been in this rodeo several times. Decades ago, I was working as a reporter in Tucson covering the so-called rape wave at the University of Arizona. I was a police reporter, and Linda Ronstadt’s brother, Peter, was the police chief.

He was considered progressive with his master’s degree, his certification from the FBI Academy and his hard work hiring female detectives for the sexual assault unit.

Unfortunately, my intersection with sexual assault and the legal system just continued. Here, a not so atypical headline: Judge accused of victim-blaming in comments on rape case

“We judges who see one sexual offence trial after another, have often been criticised for suggesting and putting more emphasis on what girls should and shouldn’t do than on the act and the blame to be apportioned to rapists,” she said, while sentencing a man to six years for raping a girl who was drunk.

The above is from jolly England. As is below:

The family courts are not a safe place for victims of domestic violence because some judges there hold “outdated views” on sexual violence and issues of consent, according to a letter signed by 130 lawyers and professionals.

The public intervention comes in response to a widely criticised judgment last year by Judge Robin Tolson QC in the family court, in which he ruled that since a woman had not taken physical steps to stop her partner from assaulting her it did not constitute rape.

I was a police reporter for Arizona newspapers, and then for two newspapers in El Paso. One hard case was covering two sheriff’s deputies accused and found guilty of raping those they pulled over for traffic stops.

Rape Crisis Center hired one of my instructors, a third degree black belt, to teach self-defense, and I, luckily as his student, got to help with grappling classes.

The landscape around Battered Wife Syndrome for me expanded as my younger sister in Arizona worked managing two safe houses for battered spouses. She covered the Chandler and greater Phoenix area, but one gig included Casa Grande and other locales.

The assistant police chief of one jurisdiction gave her his personal cell phone number because he was worried about his officers not taking the role responsibly in terms of investigating charges of domestic abuse.

He told my sister that he would make an “any-time of the day and night” response to an emergency involving domestic abuse. These safe houses were only as safe as the residents’ ability to stay calm and not give out the location to family and, unfortunately, their abusers.

She made that emergency call when one of the resident’s husbands had found the address and was outside in a truck threatening to drive up the driveway and crash into the Apache Junction house that sheltered eight women, five pets, six children, and three case workers.

Here, tips for judges hearing victims of domestic violence: Domestic Violence & The Courtroom Knowing The Issues… Understanding The Victim

You can call it implicit bias. Misogony writ large. The fact is, the Johnny Depp case show massive amounts of hate against women, not just Heard.

Judges need to be trained in implicit bias against women. They need training in how victims often present and how the facts may not line up perfectly, especially in a domestic violence case. There needs to be more sensitivity afforded to women. Social science must play a role in judge’s training.

The judges must be taught to consider why a woman might stay in an abusive relationship, why she might not go to the police, and why she might not have any records or proof of injuries. Why may there be no physical injuries? Why her fear may be exacerbated over time. Why she might even return to him. The court must consider these possibilities with understanding and compassion. (source)

The Newport News Times readership sees a plethora of domestic abuse cases reported in the newspaper, on blogs and social media. Those are the ones that get reported.

It may be called “intimate partner violence,” or it may just be called “spousal rape,” though many judges, cops and civilians see that as an impossibility.

I have been in a court in Spokane where a judge told the victim he had a hard time believing her that she was raped in an acquaintance rape because she did not have any signs of bruises or cuts or contusions.

That was in 2010. I ran into the same attitude in Tucson in 1978.

Have things changed? Well, my friend had never been in a criminal justice situation, so when she called the Sheriff Department, she was surprised at how cooperative and understanding the lead investigating officer has been.

The Assistant District Attorney and the Crime Victims workers have been helpful. But still, the situation is not resolved after three months, and May is another date set for another hearing. She has attempted to get a civil restraining order heard, but because her husband is locked up, that case has been moved for future hearings.

Luckily, she has applied for some crime victims’ assistance and has gotten a counselor who takes Oregon Health Plan. That counselor is gutsy, proactive and helping my friend get her head wrapped around many years of living in this yo-yo situation of leaving/returning/the abuser apologizing/then more abuse.

I could list a thousand studies and a dozen statistics around the causes and facts around spousal abuse;  the reality of a Stockholm Syndrome phenomenon and the pervasiveness of verbal, financial and physical abuse mostly perpetrated by the male partner in a heterosexual relationship.

The term ‘Battered Woman Syndrome’ was coined by Dr Lenore Walker known as the ‘mother of Battered Woman Syndrome’ in the 1970’s to understand and explain the psychological state of women suffering from ‘intimate partner violence’.

Battered Woman Syndrome has been described as a pattern of violence inflicted on a woman by her mate. It refers to a set of behaviour and psychological reactions displayed by women who are subjected to severe long term domestic abuse.

The growing body of research and judgments across several countries have shown that battered partners suffering from the battered woman syndrome are likely to use force to defend themselves and sometimes even kill their abusers because of the abusive and life-threatening situation that they are in which find themselves acting in a firm belief that there is no other way of self-preservation. (source, from India, Do You Know About Battered Woman Syndrome Faced By Domestic Violence Survivors?)

She has covered up her shame by isolating herself, but now, she is reconnecting to sister, parents and friends who see how the cycle of abuse created in a woman self-deception that the abuse was HER fault, or that something she did has triggered this fellow to lay into her.

Symptoms

According to the NCADV, a person experiencing abuse may:

• feel isolated, anxious, depressed, or helpless
• be embarrassed or fear judgment and stigmatization
• love the person who is abusing them and believe that they will change
• be emotionally withdrawn
• deny that anything is wrong or excuse the other person
• be unaware of the type of help that is available
• have perceived moral or religious reasons for staying in the relationship

The person may also behave in ways that can be difficult for people outside the relationship to understand.

These behaviors include:

• refusing to leave the relationship
• believing that the other person is powerful or knows everything
• when things are calm, idealizing the person who carried out the abuse
• believing that they deserve the abuse

The impact of an abusive relationship can continue long after leaving it. For some time, the person may:

• experience sleep problems, including nightmares and insomnia
• have sudden intrusive feelings about the abuse
• avoid talking about the abuse
• avoid situations that remind them of the abuse
• experience feelings of anger, sadness, hopelessness, or worthlessness
• have intense feelings of fear
• have panic attacks or flashbacks to the abuse (source)

The criminal justice system is clogged. The public defenders in Oregon are in crisis mode – too many cases, and many lawyers went into defense as a way to illicit justice for the accused. However, law school debts of $200,000 and salaries of around $65,000 to $110,000 don’t jive with their education, training and experience.

Earlier this year, the American Bar Association published a report finding that Oregon barely had 31% of the public defenders it needed to provide adequate criminal defense to those facing criminal charges. That’s something that public defenders themselves have known and experienced first hand for many years. Carl Macpherson, executive director of the Metropolitan Public Defender, says the shortage that’s developed is unconstitutional and unethical. He says part of the problem is an increasing number of people who are entering the system because of a lack of other services, like mental health and substance abuse treatment. And, judges are dismissing cases if a needed public defender isn’t available.

“This is not a public defender crisis,” Macpherson told OPB. “This is a total public safety system failure.” (source)

I even organized, through SEIU in Seattle, public defenders who were in our union. In that city and in hundreds other, the accused are not getting full defenses. That means that many accused and guilty folk are getting plea agreements that are not fitting their crimes.

Innocent people are not getting defense.

And victims like my friend have to course through a system that is bogged down by a legal Byzantine bureaucracy, as well as just a shortage of judges, Assistant District Attorneys and public defenders. And the judges, man, and the dirty dealings of defense attorneys utilizing restrictive laws stating a victim can’t bring up a pattern of past abuse in a case involving the 911 call that got the charges leveled against the abuser.

I try to stay calm and neutralized, but the fact is cops are bad, judges are freaks, and prosectuors and assistant prosecutors over charge the case hoping for fear factors to have the defendent plea to a lesser charge. There is no fire in the belly of many prosecutors, and what the hell does that mean in the scheme of things. Forget about these people — cops, judges, prosecutors, victim advocates — being truly trauma informed and trauma activated supports

We conducted a narrative analysis of anecdotes shared by judges (n = 20) who preside over Domestic Violence Protective Order (DVPO) hearings to examine how biases and misperceptions shape decisions in DVPO cases. We found that judges rely on biases to sort cases as “true domestic violence” compared with “frivolous cases.” In the anecdotes they shared, judges often used gendered stereotypes to depict litigants, and many judges felt that DVPOs had limited efficacy in preventing violence. We argue that important cognitive insights are revealed by interview participants during the spontaneous act of storytelling. In the case of judges, their biases could lead to DVPOs being denied in situations when they are warranted. (source = Judging Domestic Violence From the Bench: A Narrative Analysis of Judicial Anecdotes About Domestic Violence Protective Order Cases)

The years of counseling she faces will be something she herself will have to pay for. The fear of retribution when the fellow gets out is another hurdle she will have to face.

Very few women I have worked with in Portland who are homeless, some of them veterans, and others drug abusers, reported to authorizes domestic abuse. So they have gone untreated.

At least my friend has garnered enough supports and chutzpah to fight for her right to be heard and right to healing. The “system,” however, is not so accommodating. Some call our justice system broken.

My friend will utilize this system in however many pieces it has be broken into.

Note: This is an evolving situation, coming to several heads soon. It is impossible for a victim to always keep her eye on the prize — going through hearings and settlement conferences and hearing that cases are weak unless there is absolute major physical harm and bruises and broken bones. Absolutely surreal but again, misogynistic. Hateful.

The list of resources out there putting fear into any plantiff, any woman calling the cops because of a flair up and attempted murder is endless:

Discounting Women: Doubting Domestic Violence Survivors’ Credibility and Dismissing Their Experiences

It’s great there is discourse and awareness and groups and associations tied to domestic violence help and litigation; however, the reality is jurors are biased and judges are biased and DA Offices are overwhelmed, and alas, even if the perpetrator spends time in jail for failing to make bail, the idea of getting no charges against the guy, no felony assault or attempted homicide, well, that runs chills up the spines of victims.

Not that prison has a million resources for getting these idiots and predators turned around, i.e anger management, classes to take repsonsiblilty fo crimes, and other forms to recenter males to understand they are the problem, and they are psychologically messed up with this abuser’s mindset and psychological profile.

Again, maybe King County (Seattle) has a more aware and progressive system to deal with victims and prosecute abusers. But the fact is go across state line, from WA to Oregon, and we get a whole set of other laws and methodologies in prosecuting these cases.

From county to county, too, can determine a positive and aggressive prosecution, or a dead on arrival one.

Here, from that handbook cited above:

Domestic violence is a pattern of behavior that one person in a relationship uses to gain power and control over their current or former spouse, intimate partner, girl/boyfriend or family/household member. Domestic Violence is a broad category that includes behaviors ranging from seemingly trivial to lethal, inflicted mostly upon women. Domestic violence (DV) is one of the most prevalent and serious crimes handled by prosecutors across the country.1 Approximately 1 in 4 women will experience DV in her lifetime and 1.3 million women are victims of DV each year (National Coalition Against DV). DV is complex in that it is entrenched in a greater context of gender, racial and social inequity that has unfairly shaped societal attitudes about how and why it happens as well as who it happens to. 2 The late King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng called domestic violence the most serious criminal justice issue communities face and called domestic violence a “crime against the human spirit.” (source)

Part Two = Bats . . . Conversations in a time of Plague . . . What’s Love Got to do with it?

[first appeared in Cirque Journal, 2023, #25]

Therein lays the problem of this conversation in a time of plague. Calling a spade a spade is one thing, but this naming of the “new” Vietnamese tropical bat, Murina beelzebub, displays both the fear in and the foolishness of the human species. What all those bats, civets, pangolins and myriad of other animals I interacted with in Indochina depend on is connected  tropical forests for survival. The web of life is certainly not understood by most scientists, especially the virologists stuck in germ theory, stuck in a bio-safety level four lab, with moon suits and all the equipment and sacrificial rodents and apes to play god with, or worse, to dance with the devil.

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Bats are especially vulnerable due to ongoing deforestation in every region they’re found. We knew this before the French pulverized parts of Indochina, and we knew it during the American War on Vietnam, and I knew it in 1994. Today, we are more than in a time of plague – exploding myths, a propaganda exercise global and digital in scope.

I am thinking now, 2022, of Edward Curtain, a magnificent essayist, or shall I say, he turns the essay into an interlinking memoir of universal vigor. Words from him can for many be raptures – enrapturing into philosophical depths, raptures of the mind, spirit and glory of finding love in all the right places. What’s love got to do with it is we have only ourselves to look to in the end for our own personal answers:

The person with whom we are all most intimate is oneself.  It’s just the way it is.  I don’t mean that in some oracular Delphic ‘know thyself’ way, or in any deep psychoanalytical sense, but very simply.  We have our own thoughts and feelings that come and go like breaths, most of   which never get expressed in words.  Together with our actions, including speech, they make up our lives.  We try to anchor them with photos and memorabilia and lots of things, but time has no mercy; it sweeps us all away. Then our things remain for a while until they become a burden  to those who remain, and then the things go. As the song reminds us, ‘We come and go like a   ripple on a stream.’

Hell, who knows if this is accurate, attributed to Heraclitus, but for me it is apropos, confounding, too — No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

I’ve used this and a dozen other quotes to ice break classes, to have fellow travelers (students) look at one epigram, deep dive into it, so they might find not only literal and denotative meanings, but so they can apply a sense of personal self and life passage to the quote.

Projection into the future, a new self, that self, hidden, but certainly trapped in our heads from the time of birth, and the birth of recognition, as butterflies alight on chubby baby legs on a beach, or through the shadows of dusk and the capes of wind where that Azores bat makes me, for the first time – me, my, his being, me, outside my “self” into the skies of another mammal.

+–+

We were ecologists, seeping into the mud, crossing leech-infested engorged rivers, jumping over cobras, dancing under the canopy as gibbons threw feces and branches at us. We were hunting for some personal connection to the diversity in the biodiversity game, hoping to unlock other forms of passion beside just knowing things in the scientific way.

We came to THEIR land to find OUR selves. That is what love is, really, a passion to unravel humanity’s connectivity, and to push away the fears that capitalism has feed up since its lofty reckoning with people, land, hopes and dreams. Imagine, carving up South America: Portugal gets Brazil, and Spain gets the rest . . . . Edicts from the Holy See. God, Country, Mother Be Damned! This is the deadly game of capitalism – there is no love in it, and the getting is the game. Accumulation, consumerism, all the throwaway in the waste stream is anti-love, and it all draws closer and closer each year in a self-hate, a sort of misanthropy against self, against humanity.

We are not rubbish, and we are not Soylent Green, yet from all that emanates out of the powers that be, from all the literature and video games and movies, that seems to be the thesis of the day – humanity is the disease, the cancer, so be done with it, and this way shall be our way, as the folks at Davos and partners of the World Economic Forum and Aspen Institute, et al. They have the narratives all written, either in plain sight or under their secret plague blankets.

I write to stop the plague. I visit with people outside my frame to learn how to continue to love people.

I just talked to a radical thinker, a farmer, who decided to email me and arrange a day to drive out to the coast where I live and have a beer and talk. Great guy. He’s been an inventor, been a restaurant owner, and now he is working a farm, three acres.

He sought me out in an act of love. Love being that innate desire of wanting the human touch.  His isolation from many friends and family — who have decided to cut ties because of his deep analysis of things during the lockdowns and mandates for this batty virus — propelled him to contact me vis-à-vis one of the radical sites where I have been publishing for 17 years.

Human and humane touch, and while I can be sort of an anomaly or freak of in the natural/predisposed/ prepackaged order of things in this country, yes, and I am naturally bombastic, recalcitrant, a regular A-1 ODD (oppositional defiance disorder), the reciprocation was an act of love on my part. Jef was seeking more than validation, more than a safe harbor from which to discuss and stay attuned to what we both agree is one positive aspect of Homos sapiens – critical thinking. We were having a conversation – we covered a lot of ground, from the bioweapons programs, to permaculture, transition cities, the staged economy, great thinkers like Ed Curtain, and others. That is the act of self-awareness and validation demonstrating humans can be cooperative, thinking, caring, and set in some mutual aid ethos.

That is what those bat caves represent and symbolize for me. And a hundred other conversations, in other times of plague – the plagues centered around the oppression, the suppression, the depression, the inflammation, enslavement that this Un-United States of Amnesia under capitalism which has unleashed plague after plague through the powerbrokers and power hoarders of the world – trillionaire companies like BlackRock and Vanguard, as well as the billionaires and millionaires working their rackets. Murder Incorporated as a moniker for the USA is not my term. Far be it for me to steal so many prescient concepts of what this country is, has been, has become, is becoming and will be in 10 years. Try a century from now. Not even a ghost of ourselves will be in the air. The digital memory will be theirs, not ours. The Great Reset is upon us.

I am not sure how many reading this even knows what the great reset is. So be it.

But Jef reached out, drove out from Albany, Oregon, and we broke bread (tortillas) and hoisted brew. One telling comment he made, for me as super emblematic of our times, and even for my own time working as an educator and social worker, is the desperation of youth:  “My wife is an elementary teacher, and she says they are being trained on how to spot a suicidal youngster. What the fuck is going on? Elementary students over the past year have doubled and triple their suicide rates. Elementary kids. Overdosing on opioids. Goddamn this entire thing is crazy.”

Therein lays the critical thinking we traversed. The cause and the effect of those suicides, turning around to see now what the effects have turned into new causes for ever more new effects.

 Effect/cause/cause/effect. This is what is missing in deep dive discourses across the land.

But I go back to bats – Chiroptera. My Arizona days, after leaving the Azores and Paris and Germany (all those bats and gargoyle creatures throughout the Old World, I do recall). Running through the desert, into the mountains, I encountered riot after riot of animals – reptiles like Gila monsters, mammals like kit foxes, amazing arachnids like battalions of tarantulas after a monsoon, and sci-fi bugs like Palos Verdes beetles. And, the bats. In caves, under ledges, in abandoned buildings, inside mine shafts, hanging from cottonwoods. Typically, it was the vampires and the free-tails which entranced me, but I loved the the lesser long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris curasoae yerbabuenae), and the Mexican long-tongued bat, Choeronycteris mexicana. So many encounters I’ve had with these mammals since they give birth and raise their young in southern Arizona from early spring through summer.

Just the list of the more than two dozen bat species in Arizona is remarkable, poetic:

Ghost-faced bat Mormoops meglophylla
California leaf-nosed bat Macrotus californicus
Mexican long-tongued bat Choeronycteris mexicana
Lesser long-nosed bat Leptonycteris curasoae
Yuma myotis Myotis yumanensis
Cave myotis Myotis velifer brevis
Occult little brown bat Myotis lucifugus occultus
Long-eared myotis Myotis evotis
Southwestern myotis Myotis auriculus
Fringed myotis Myotis thysanodes
Long-legged myotis Myotis volans
California myotis Myotis californicus
Western small-footed myotis Myotis ciliolabrum
Silver-haired bat Lasionycteris noctivagans
Western pipistrelle Pipistrellus hasperus
Big brown bat Eptesicus fuscus
Western red bat Lasiurus blossevillii
Southern yellow bat Lasiurus ega
Hoary bat Lasiurus cinereus
Spotted bat Euderma maculatum
Allen’s lappet-browed bat Idionycteris phyllotis
Townsend’s big-eared bat Corynorhinus townsendii
Pallid bat Antrozous pallidus
Mexican free-tailed bat Tadarida brasiliensis mexicana
Pocketed free-tailed bat Nyctinomops femorosaccus
Big free-tailed bat Nyctinomops macrotis
Greater western mastiff bat Eumops perotis californicus
Underwood’s mastiff bat Eumops underwoodi

Missing from the list is the vampire, the vampire bats, a species of the subfamily Desmodontinae, also of the  leaf-nosed variety found in Mexico, Central and South America. They latch onto birds (turkeys) or cattle for a blood diet, a feeding trait called hematophagy.

I’ve seen the bats lapping up blood from the backs of cattle in Chiapas and Guatemala. I have talked to local ranchers and farmers, and guano collectors. I have talked with a few Mexican biologists. All about bats. This is a fascinating creature, and the 1,400 known species of bats cover almost a third of all mammal species, but not many are into hematophagy. Most bats suck nectar and dive for insects, fish, lizards, snakes.

The vampires were once in synch with nature, integrated into a balanced food web, until  the “conquest” by Spain, when the blood, cross, steel and germs introduced cattle and horses and the corrales, which gave the species, Desmodus rotundus, or the vampire bat, an immobilized source of blood. There were not many of these vampiros before the Spanish invasion, since they fed (lapping up the blood) of the pavo, wild turkeys.

For Desmodus rotundus, every corral was a cafeteria, so the number of vampire bats in Mexico has been growing steadily for centuries. Think of life out of balance, Koyaanisqatsi, or Life-Unraveling from Cohesion,  this one incursion into the land with these domesticated bovine creating a huge population explosion.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/v6-K-arVl-U?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Alas, those unsuspecting cows and horses don’t just end up with open wounds, however, since vampire bats often leave them with paralytic rabies. The reaction of a rancher watching many of his animals die slow, horrible deaths, that is a sight to behold, and who cannot empathize with his desire to seek out the bats’ home and blow it to kingdom come.

This fear of bats —  this misidentification of all bats as vampires — has put so many non-blood sucking species in peril, on the brink of extinction. Caves are blown up, or the openings are caged with chicken wire. All those millions of pounds of insects scooped up by the insectivores are now back as miniature demons in the out of whack food web. Whereupon, millions of gallons of insecticides are applied to “handle” the crop-eating and parasite-laden pests.  The vicious cycle of man’s continuing fear, and lack of critical thinking and deep holistic understanding of how to stay in balance with the cycles of nature, with the food web – with bats – has much to do with our current epoch:  a world soon to be without ice.

I can go back to the movie, Koyaanisqatsi, which is actually a Hopi word defined as “life of moral corruption and turmoil” or “life out of balance”. Getting deeper into the word, the prefix koyaanis– means “corrupted” or “chaotic”, and the word qatsi means “life” or “existence”. The film actually adds to the meaning – “crazy life, life out of balance, life in turmoil, life disintegrating, and a state of life that calls for another way of living.”

+–+

We went to several caves, and we met some resilient guano collectors. We ate and slept in the caves, and the food – canned tuna and hard ramen noodles – came in contact with everything. There were no antiseptic wipes. We drank river water treated with iodine. Lots of quart-sized bottles of beer. The Brits chain smoked. We played cards on the earth. Bats flew above, around, near, and on two occasions, slammed into my hat.   Bia Hanoi, 333 and some Chinese brands we sipped during the breaks between rush hours. We carried out what we packed in.

One night I woke up shivering, around 3 am, before the rush hour back to the caves, and I pulled a huge black centipede from the thin piece of canvas I was using for a bedroll. Welts, shivers, temperature of 40 Celsius (104 F). Oh, the vagaries of roughing it in a country of dragon boats, Russian busses, endless streams of bicycles and motorcycles, dogs running around, and poor and good people. Plastic bags and junk stacked to the moon and back.

Bats, magnificent and weird bats. The cataloguing was haphazard, and one of the fellows was wanting to get (discover) a bat yet to be catalogued by Western science, and then he’d write about it, get a short article in the Mammalian Journal. Help with his doctoral dissertation.  Cheers. He was a Scotsman, age 23, talking to me, 36. Asking me about the war, the American War on Vietnam, the affects of it at home, etc.

I reminded him of his history, UK’s: Operation Masterdom  but  also known as the Southern Resistance War (Vietnamese: Nam Bộ kháng chiến) by the Vietnamese. This was a a post– World War II armed conflict involving a largely British- Indian and French task force and Japanese troops. They went up against the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese communist movement, for control of the southern half of the country, after the Japanese surrender. The Brits lost.

I reminded him that arms were being sent by the Brits to South Vietnam. I reminded him plenty of Brits fought in Vietnam, through resignation and then enlisting in the armed forces of Australia and New Zealand. Canadians enlisted in US forces. Plenty of covert operations were carried out by Britain. Britain officially recognized and supported South Vietnamese President Diem who requested help and received it: British Advisory Mission to South Vietnam (BRIAM).

Down the mountain we slogged – dirty, disheveled, stinky. We ended up in one of the villages not located on our maps. We drank Bia Hoi by the gallon — draft beer. The kids and old people watched us from the slated walls. Definite oddities, as the guys had long hair, and the two women had shaved sides and beads in the back, braided. Red-haired Ian, with huge flowing scarlet beard. Doctor Viet helped with the translation. He was gulping green tea, steamy in the night air.

We drank and ate with miners, farmers and foresters. I ended up in a constant arm-wrestling match with all number of guys. We were in close quarters, and like all of Vietnam, it seemed, there were old and young, boy and man, some females, grabbing our hands as we walked through their small rural/outback town. We were on display, and back at the beer garden, slash restaurant (the lady and man who owned it let us crash there at night on benches and tables for a small fee), more people came out to see who these vagrants were.

We talked about bats, showed them a book of bats we used for identification purposes. We got one lead after the next on caves close by. Endless caves. Huge colonies. Amazing stories of flying foxes bigger than the dogs they were eating. One older lady that first evening brought our science troupe seven deep fried bats. Horseshoe.  Down the hatch, bloke.

Most people were healthy, yet the men smoked cigarettes and bongs-full of tobacco. The women chewed betel nut, as the telltale aftereffect of dark stained teeth when they smiled. I asked to try some and they laughed, but I persisted. The numbing effects of a mild narcotic were not unlike the first few chews of a coca leaf.

Bats, for sure, and that love’s gotta have it for the people riff was running through my head, no matter how far away we were culturally, how unusual our thinking styles might have been. People of the land, simple people, survivors, cutting, slicing, gutting, shooting, frying, boiling, mashing anything around them to survive. To eat. I loved them inside, my own way. With these words, too. Then, and now.

Coffee plantations and fields of tea plants: all these operations were locally-supported through local labor, but the products and the profits are shipped out of the region, many times lugged overland to China or in container ships to Europe.

The coffee and tea operations were cutting into more and more of the forest. More and more checkerboard pieces of land appeared. More and more fractured so-called habitat for any number of animals – reptiles, amphibians, birds, ground mammals, larger species like deer, and the elusive Asian tiger. And the people came to settle in order to work the plantations, and, alas, more trails up into the woods, more hunting, more rattan cutting, and, the bats. Caves to traverse, deeply spelunked, for that rich fertilizer,  guano. Hunting in the dark for bats to eat. And then, down the hills and mountains, maybe great hornbills sacrificed for brooms sold at markets. Brooms of magnificent feathers. That is not ecology, Vietnam style.

Viet and I talked about ecology, and biodiversity. At the time there was no word in Vietnamese for ecology. Or at least no groups of words to define it as a holistic concept — he was a tree expert with some engineering background who happened to fall into a job with the Hanoi Biological Institute. But drilling down, we did find common language for this field of biology that describes the relationships of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. The idea of one species being a large part of the whole is not always understood in most cultures. You know, take one colony of bats out of the equation, and in 10 years, you have children with skin lesions and with GI issues and tumors in the mouths of older people. Because of the pesticides!

How is that bat connected to us, the food, the air, the soil, and then we talked about the insects, the pests, the crop eaters, and even mosquitoes bearing malaria and other diseases, how in places like Mexico, the amount of poisons applied to crops goes up each year, and the pests that once were food for the bats, well, they are at war with the farmers.

Then, those toxins, those bug killers getting into the food chain, and through bioaccumulation in other species, like fish they eat, the toll comes later, in other forms of human degradation, including covered-up chronic diseases.  We talked about the eagle, American Bald Eagle, and the application of DDT throughout the land cutting into the reproductive tracks of eagles and causing shells to thin, which in turn resulted in broken incubating eggs. Near extinction.

In Vietnam, and elsewhere, there is a rare mountain-hawk eagle, also known Hodgson’s. So many animals in Vietnam are on the edge of extinction, including the water buffalo black-crested gibbon; Indochinese tiger; red-shanked douc; Siamese crocodile; Vietnam flying frog; Vietnamese gecko; Delacour’s langur; banded eagle ray.  The Indochinese tiger is probably extinct, as is the Javan rhinoceros and Northern Sumatran rhinoceros. So many  different bird, snake, and frog species are extinct in Vietnam, but actual numbers are unknown.

War, suffering, food, starvation, the will of one species, man, to live above all others.

Man, at the top, the progenitor of the Seventh Mass Extinction, it our tribute to over consumption and throwaway everything society, our Anthropocene.

+–+

So many of us even now in this great critical thinking extinction event – lockdowns, mandates, de-platforming, delisting, stopping the scientific method of testing and retesting hypothesis — want to know origins. Simple stuff, for most thinking humanity. How did we get bogged down in Afghanistan, or Vietnam? How did we allow the social safety nets to get frayed and shredded? How did we become so reliant on other countries’ farming and manufacturing? How possible is it that there’s life outside our galaxy? Is there water on Mars, and if so, so what? How do we get back to a precautionary principle and holistic approach to human health? First do no harm, isn’t that the medical credo, and where is it now?

The origin stories – who was on Turtle Island before “contact,” and what was that land bridge all about? Who were the ancient seafarers? How are we the sum total of the virome’s and biome’s magnificent interplay of bacteria and viruses?

We want history, and we are – some of us – looking at history with new lenses, new information, much more deeper considerations and intersectionalities. If there are social determinants of health, then there are determinants of vaccine policy tied to decades of research, both open scientific research and the nefarious stuff of governments/militaries looking for weaponizing almost anything on earth, including bacteria and viruses?

If science can give us napalm, white phosphorous, depleted uranium ammunition, well, what else is science cooking up under the auspices of money-making, profits, and, well, paranoia vis-à-vis weaponizing?

The story of bat research goes way back. The bat is a good example of diversity, since there are 1, 400 species, or more yet to be discovered. More than two decades of “paranoia” around bioterrorism have ramped up U.S. funding for a “subgenre of viral surveillance that entails hunting and studying previously unknown viruses in wildlife.”

 “Outbreak prediction,” goes beyond just tracking diseases that affect people. The public health officials have relied on this for almost a century to understand the precursors and causes of epidemics. This new viral research is all about “discovering” the most dangerous pathogens before they jump to humans. But is that just it, discovery?

Again, many of us are for this robust form of research – basically hunting viruses in remote locations and then transporting, storing, and experimenting on the most dangerous pathogens. Many of us like myself are doubting the real value of this pursuit of viruses which have yet to infect people. In fact, we believe that this method of research could be the fuse that ignites the bomb, the next and the next and the next pandemic .

There is much evidence this SARS-CoV2 is all about that sort of accident, those sorts of genetic and serial passage experiments. Some of the groups and government agencies are corrupt, and many individuals  over the past twenty-four months have sought out my opinion about secret military and military-private sector research on disease, on ways to weaponize viruses.

Yet, if this were an essay on the history of bioweapons, on the Nazis, Japanese, Americans and the Russians working on various biological and chemical weapons, which are in simple terms, weapons of mass destruction, or mass death, then we’d be looking at an entirely different method of presenting the evidence, history, perspectives, quotes and conclusions. And implications.

This is the Conversation in a Time of Plague, however, looking at my own relationship with words. Accordingly, many times throughout even this writing process, my words are sounding hollow, anachronistic , empty. Given the subtext to this essay or my position, that is, of having a deep love of earth and people and those interrelationships with my own fears, doubts and frailties, now, in 2022, as I hit the speed limit of 65 years of age, almost each paragraph sounds off kilter, not of my time, or of “their” time.

Who the hell wants to read this batty shit?

I knew that fruit bats are natural hosts of the Nipah virus, which can cause brain swelling, seizures, comas, and ultimately death in humans. We found out the Zika virus, which causes babies to be born with very small heads and other potentially deadly birth defects, was isolated in a rhesus monkey. MERS, the coronavirus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome, was traced to camels from Saudi Arabia. And HIV infects baboons and chimpanzees, and whether it jumped species naturally or with a little help from science, the virus is responsible for killing 36 million people worldwide.

The current plague of silence, in this unfolding Decade of Corona, speaks of palm civets sold in markets, and then this SARS found in horseshoe bats living in remote caves in Ynnan Province infecting miners.

However, I embrace those bats, the pathogens, the love of evolution, this human terrain of ups and down, starts and false starts. I love the brains and the discourse which was so elegant and humane, before this love and death in a time of plague, or pandemic, or as it is now, endemic.

I was with many bat species, colonies and individuals, and I upset their homes, their flight patterns by playing scientist with “real” scientists. That was the essence of a truckload (vectors) of pathogens entering my body, and my mind. I like this statement from a pathogen person:

“Squirming, clawed and toothy animals bite and scratch during collection of body fluids. Teeth and talons easily penetrate the thin gloves required to maintain dexterity when handling fragile wildlife. And overhead, angry bats release a fine patina of virus-laden urine aerosols,” as infectious disease specialist Michael Callahan wrote of his virus-hunting expeditions. “The fact that researchers are not infected every time they do a field collection is a question that continues to stump us.”

That bat lady from China was featured in a Scientific American article, “How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus, in June 2020. Her name is Shi Zhengli. And just up until mid-2020, there was a robust exchange of research and knowledge between China, USA and other nations.

But in the time of coronavirus, the discourse has been scuttled.  That’s the bat crazy angle of this I am coming from. Listen to her quoted in the article: The efforts paid off. The pathogen hunters discovered hundreds of bat-borne coronaviruses with incredible genetic diversity. “The majority of them are harmless,” Shi Zhengli said. “But dozens belong to the same group as SARS. They can infect human lung cells in a petri dish and cause SARS-like diseases in mice.”

In Shitou Cave—where painstaking scrutiny has yielded a natural genetic library of bat-borne viruses—the team discovered a coronavirus strain that came from horseshoe bats with a genomic sequence nearly 97 percent identical to the one found in civets in Guangdong. The finding concluded a decade-long search for the natural reservoir of the SARS coronavirus.

The horseshoe bats, man, are my friends in those caves along the Laotian border. The entire unfolding of today, as I write this, for me, is interspersed with my own evolution in this world – a dangerous one, for sure, since for me, Capitalism is a disease, and it is closing in on more and more people, not as something to benefit them, but for which to exploit them, and to rub them out, as Jimmy Cagney said.

The screws are being tightened. The propaganda has been set forth a hundred years ago. Our planned and perceived lives and deaths are all marketed, and put into play. There are both overt and covert agendas, and there are still some of us who want to see through the power plays, expose the actors in this theater of the dominance, and report on the suppression, oppression and obsessions the marketers (tin soldiers for the billionaires) foist upon children as soon as they are born!

*–*

Now, how is this going to connect and do a bang-up job concluding an essay on bats? You see, even with my love of nature, my engagement with people, in other places, through their own eyes, mine, as they are  Eyes Wide Open, I still have this sense that even the crazy ones like those that reach out to me across states and oceans (I don’t mean crazy in that way, so hold your horses, Cancel Culture) are actually the ones that count. They have a truth in them from decades living their own truths in a world of lies.

Some call them batty.   

Maybe the key for me know is what Jean-Paul Satre said, succinctly – “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

The formulae have already been sketched out. We know what is right from wrong, deep down, if we decide to traverse that dark cave and explore the hidden meaning of being a man or woman in this world. What it is to be with bats, with the flights in and out of our own dark caves … that will always be the wave of human touch in me. Ironically, it is the bat which pulls the human from me.

Even in that darkness, there is light, and the bats are blended into space, that obsidian trench which for them is home and roost, the place of supplication to the energy god, and where they rest, we tear into. But we know deep down the flight of the bat is true, as is the gait of a wolf, even one espying a lamb out on old Jake’s ranch.

Ready for reconfirmation, or some moment in struggle when recharging of life is the memory. This is it, a bat essay, tied loosely to love of humanity – that humanity – struggling, for sure, and most times losing the battle. But to have that chance to be in the middle of bats, or on a reef with a hundred small hammerheads overhead, that is the shape of dreams and nightmares, both the balance of being alive in our time.

Bats . . . Conversations in a time of Plague . . . What’s Love Got to do with it?

Part One

Cirque #25 [first appeared in current Cirque Journal]

The lie lulls or dreams, like the illusion. The truth is the only power, cheerful, inexhaustible. If we  were able to live only of, and for truth: young and immortal energy in us. The man of truth does not age. A little more effort and he will not die. – Albert Camus

We were up high in a cave, near the border of Laos. The one Vietnamese with us, a scientist, Viet, wondered what kind of crazy mad dogs and Englishmen we were.

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He and I were the same age, 36, and most of the team members were in early 20’s, and one guy from Canada was 20.

Viet and I discussed his work on rural farming and the system of getting rice farmers to breed fish in the paddies, and to use fish to eat/take to market and utilizing fish poop to fertilize. Snails breed and live in abundance, too, for eating/market purposes.  The water is actually cleaner this way for boiling consumption. Simple design, but lots of resistance and some hurdles to traverse. Even small two-light bulb output low flow power generators, dropped in the water that slurries of through gravity, that’s another one of Viet’s passions.

Viet is one of hundreds of people I have come to love for their minds, souls and life’s passageways out of struggle and poverty (the war against Vietnam by France and USA, et al, for Viet and his family, tragedy piled onto tragedy), to a sense of purpose, a bit of calm. That calm is gained with intellectual fellowship.

We drank green tea and talked a lot.

I wonder about him, now, as 28 years have passed. His family, job, the state of Vietnam, the rapaciousness of capitalism conquering markets, tying up land, building exclusive resorts, and his own health with the additional pollutants in air, water, soil. The climate crisis. All of that, and then, of course, how’s he doing under this new plague, the other one, this bat plague and the attendant plague of various forms of fascism and mental and physical lockdown?

I wonder as life and death moves like a circle of locusts through the land, inside cities, in rural places, within families. I can’t shake Ouroboros from my mind. Snake shaped as an eternal biological cyclic of renewal or a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The real snake I share the house with, ball python, leaves old skin sloughed off monthly, a transmigration of soul, his previous soul left for me to remark. Remade, in a sense, and the molt is the leftover negative of his (we call him Copernicus) life, monthly.

If only humans understood this transmigration. What a species we might become.

How can I touch the Ouroboros  without thinking of a kind family man, Viet, who was not thrilled with my proclivity for finding real snakes in the hills and jungle. I did talk about the silver Ouroboros around my neck, the snake biting its own tail. I attempted to let him know that while it is a fertility symbol in some religions, with the tail of the snake a phallus and the mouth womb, that for me I hold it as circle of universal light, knowledge and rebirth, second birth, and death and struggle. Mine.

Circle, an encircling of my own beginning-middle-end-beginning.

I wonder about the symbol now, Ouroboros, in this propaganda operation lifting capitalists and technocrats above everyone . . . how-out- of synch are most scientists I know about, communicate with and read . . . being out of balance inside cages lined with hubris, well, that is the plague upon all of us. The battiness of our time. Shut-down conversations. A place now where love is not a driver for our relations and relationships.

This is a plague of gigantic proportions, as scientists as mad in the head as Mengele dance with the devil, fill-in for Mother Nature, tinker with genes, extend and retract lifespans at the push of a gene editor, with contagions hacked and transmissibility amped up.

The reverberation echoes deep inside me since my life has been one of discovery and open dialogue, critical and systems thinking, research and discourse, mutual aid and writing.

So many days the past two years for me have displayed spiritual near dead-ends, where meaning is stripped like that molting snake’s skin from my own grounding, or lack of grounding. Conversations are clipped, and deep dives into logic and ethos, they are blips, like sand between dry fingers.

The work in Vietnam 28 years ago was all about embracing constructs way outside my own, and the discussions and deep excavation of those around me and myself were both beautiful and challenging, sometimes rough.

In Vietnam, on this biological survey, I was the lone American, age 36, the same age as my old man who was shot (wounded badly) in Vietnam, farther south of where we were setting up a dark bird net to carry out a haphazard bat collecting sweep.

+–+

The dragon shaped smoke billowing in the village tethered me to other people, and with the British graduate students yammering about this or that Vietnamese fag (cigarette) and beer, I demanded a shift out of their meanderings.  I wanted to leap into the darkness and float to the small earthen floor homes and sit and drink tea, gulp homemade whisky and watch the plastic figures on their tiny TVs while attempting to talk about their world, and mine.

So I wrote in my journal.

The news, music and dramas were coming in from China broadcasters. It was surreal but familiar, rural, a place I had already been all my life.

Zither music ricocheted off near yelping dogs. The water buffalo pulled up air and mud with the sound of their reverse slurps conjoined like a dozen bowling balls smashing into a bog.

Time to think, time to contemplate. Again, the beauty is not always in the moment, but from a memory of a day before, maybe. The climb up was muddy, and everyone was wet. This was not a well-outfitted science team. Brits don’t always think of all the things to make it – roughing it — a little more bearable.

We dug our own latrine at base camp, cooked food on open fires, and there was one generator, and that was not for nighttime lighting. I crossed rivers (during the rainy season, so it was more like a wrestling match fully head in with leech-loving rapids) to resupply. The Russian motocross bikes we had bogged down and failed most of the time.

Now, the memories are raw, in the slipstream of poetic embrace, with some journalistic objectivity mixed in. At times, in the constant rain, isolated, in that jungle and in the primary forest, loneliness did mess with the mind.

Yet, there were always the Vietnamese and ethnic minority families we came across. And the deep recesses of limestone. Caves. The snakes, too, in trees, vipers and unmatched beautiful thin ones, as thin as flute reeds.

Caves of the mind and spirit, that’s an easy leap. Thinking of what we were doing as science and the fun of busting butt climbing through the underbrush, I knew that was a good thing, but the late night cave ceiling encounters  and bats fluttering in and out, and the primitive villages down below (we hit five caves in five different places), and my own sense of mortality – the gut diseases, the shivers, the cuts and fungus between toes, and the wipeouts with the Minsk 250 cc motorbikes – this also shaped my stream of thought, the consciousness connected to these mates, and the idea of where I was.

Never another Vietnam. Those homeless guys I worked with back home. The military bases where I taught college classes. Guys like Tim O’Brien, The Things they Carried, and others I had run into back home as a journalist and literary hanger on, that too was evocative for me, in-country, on the edge of Laos. Real biodiversity work, but a haphazard way of shaping my feelings there.

I was the only American, and they came to know, not that kind of American.  That was pointed out so many times. And the Vietnamese sought me out too, well, to embrace, arm wrestle, ask me what I thought of their country. My pretty nice diver’s watch they all touched, wanting  to feel its weight.

“Is it real Rolex? You go under waves with it? Can we trade? Submariner, good shit!”

Amazing things were offered as trade – a huge chunk of jade bigger than a softball. A rare looking archeological carving of a turtle and tiger. A broken down 100 cc motorcycle. An M-16 rifle.  Two book manuscripts that looked like they were from 1500, AD, Chinese or Korean.  One gentleman offered to put me up for a year in his raised house on the edge of town. Just for the watch.

They all wanted to know what we were looking for in the caves. Again, ecology was not a word in the Vietnamese language, even with the scientists at the biological institute in Hanoi where we had gone before getting deep into primary forest.

I wrote many passages about what Vietnam is, what the war is, and what ecology might look like in a poor country, one where people were literally left starving to eat, grass, bugs, and, bats.

This last cave went back pretty far, like an esophagus of our childhood’s worst nightmares. Monster chasing you into the night. Roaring and dark mouth, widening. Then, the sounds of bats way up, clinging before the appointed hour to break away and scurry into air for their eating hours, another evil memory soundtrack from movies. Rush hour out. Timed, this circadian urge, or the shape of sky with the sun over the horizon and filaments of photons hitting their eyes. Or electromagnetic fields emanating from heavens and bouncing into stones and valleys after the sun spills over into our night. Or the sounds of gnats and moths and dozens of other species turning sky into conveyor belts of feeding, breeding and flying toward light, or anything shiny or scaly.

The urge to leave and fly as mammals into the night, that is the wonder. The cycle of in and out, and then the hibernation, sometimes months at a time, depending on the bat species. Amazing species to learn from.

The corona virus blues, all that experimentation, all those samples collected. Specimens of viruses morphing from phase to serial phase. Labs, scientists, lights, hood ventilation, moon suits, all the research, and the nefarious ones, in spook-land, and the military, there, capturing data, unpublished reports and studies.

I had no thoughts of that stuff in 1994 – pre-Covid SARS-CoV2 –C-19 blues. What three decades does to the shifting baselines, to the knowledge base, to the collective consciousness.

+–+

There are eight of us, and the seven of them smoke, with Viet only taking an offered rolled cigarette infrequently. We are not making fire, not making hot tea, not lighting the rocky floor with flames. Some have flashlights and some have head lamps.

Music below is clichéd ghostly. In the distance are the shapes of knobby up-thrust rock formations covered in matty jungle. Around us to the west us are hills, carpeted with picked-over jungle and then well-used paths leading to mountains, alpine, elfin and misty hidden cliffs.

The goal is to get bats going out (and then, later coming in), pull them gingerly out of the forgiving netting, measure them, weigh them, take notes, photograph them, and then, let them go their merry ways out to the hunting grounds.

In the dark, essential, with focused beams of light on their, well, let’s call them faces only a mother bat would love. These are not the faces of those fruit bats (flying foxes) illustrating the book, Stellaluna which I read to my newborn child a year and a half after leaving Vietnam.

Echolocation. More than 1,400 species of bats around the world (we’re still discovering more). Most bats are endangered. Many bats are sick. Homes, caves, caverns, outcroppings and trees are contaminated with the whistling, chopping, sawing, bulldozing, burning, spraying, digging, razing, desiccating, polluting, damming efforts of man.

This is just one animal, one part of the biodiversity equation (oh, each bat species has its own niche, which is amazingly complex, cooperative, competitive, symbiotic, parallel with other species) but still illustrative  of the  never- ending story of Western scientists (white guys and gals, mostly) parachuting into someone else’s world and ramming through this or that study, this or that report, this or that deep analysis or any variety of  scurrying bio-blitz, transect of THEIR land, of THEIR people, of THEIR species, of THEIR habits.

I was loosely part of that parachuting into Vietnam, with wide open eyes, an open line of communication, and what I knew, more of less at the time, was all that love having everything to do with my own curiosity and haggard walkabout in life. Why I went to Vietnam — to help people back home exorcise their demons.

I also knew I was different, un-American, a product of that Vietnam War, and I was unabashedly anti-imperial, and that included being anti-Britain, in many forms, to go along with my anti-American (USA) frame of reference almost anywhere I went, reported on and taught at.

To then come to now, 2022, with Wuhan, World Military Games, DARPA, University of North Carolina, Anthony Fauci, EcoHealth Alliance, and other topics for which I have done deep dives into with hundreds of others into the sciences – that science, around viruses, and then, the darker side, bioweapons research around “those” viruses – facts, unresolved debates, all of that, not just locked up in my head, but swirling around like bats in, well, a cave, or would that be the belfry?

*-*

It began, or at least as we know it through the massive media system of command and control, with the end game selling us on a constant diet of fear: fear of not having enough, fear of not fitting in, fear of falling behind, fear of life, fear of death, fear of loneliness, fear of the unknown, fear of the known, fear of forgetting, fear of poverty-eviction-foreclosure-bankruptcy-prison.  The madmen of Madison Avenue intersecting with PT Barnum (that sucker born every nanosecond, now) and with Edward Bernays and the Chicago Boys and witch hunts, the Dulles Brothers and J. Edgar Hoover, and, well, so many tendrils to the root of evil for which this essay is not digging up.

Imagine a society brought up on duck and cover as a way to stave off nuclear annihilation. That science. That propaganda. That delusion.

That psychological fear of not being, or, of being this or that undesirable thing, for which has been preset, goes back hundreds of years, maybe more, but for us, now, 2022, this is the land of make-over after make-over; take-over after cooption;, left-over after trickle-down, with the constant amnesia and marketing of lies, fabrications, half-truths and mythologies as the conduit for the fear of not having or fear of having. The process of studying this phenomenon, as in anthropological terms, is, agnotology which is using historical forensics to delve into the process of unknowing.

In this time of plague, corona plague, where oh where is the study of deliberate, culturally-induced ignorance or doubt?  Throughout the land, throughout all those chambers of power, it seems, there is a hard and soft sell of a product, idea, concept, and much of this is through the constant publishing of inaccurate or misleading scientific studies. Propaganda as weapon, but also as teacher and marketer. Dangerous times. Mother and father, propagandists at birth.

Toward some ends, this agnotology illustrates a sort of paralysis, not just analysis paralysis, but this overlay in our culture of “more knowledge of a subject leaving us more uncertain – unknowing — than before.”  It leaves many dry, confused, in a Stockholm Syndrome empty gut land of overeating, overspending, overdreaming.

The news broadcasts, already jimmy- rigged to confuse and colonize the average person, drew us in. It was lightning speed, the Wuhan lab, the plague, or in this case, a corona virus, setting us up with a novel awakening of the monsters and mobsters that are the characters of those many circles of hell Dante obsessed over.

For some, this was a military propaganda operation, and then others drew from history – a container ship full of papers, reports and books on the nefarious ways of the Western mind. We do not need to start with Josef Mengele, and we can go way back, seeing how Turtle Island, how all of the southern parts of America, was colonized using a sophisticated and effective contamination of not just the land and the spirit, but of the body.

It was religion ruled by the bank.

Before 2020, we had been looking into many plagues –bioweapons programs of the USA, in concert not just with the Department of Defense (offense) and DARPA, Fort Detrick, Plum Island, etc.,  but with the assistance of the web of scientists at private Tier One and state universities cooking up toxins, poisons, weapons of mass destruction. The same science that produces an X-Box is behind the illegal and murderous drone assassination program of Barak Obama,  or  the total awareness snooping programs and hacking which Edward Snowden uncovered.

The same marketing gurus and regulatory bodies that pumped out the many devilish heads of The Oxycontin Crisis are working their dark arts in the Corona Crisis. Except, now, since beginning in 2020, there are no real conversations, no critical debates about policies, about experimentation, about informed consent. We went from hating Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson, and Monsanto and Bayer, et al, to, well, fill in the colonizing methodology now deployed.  You can question “that” science, but not “this” science.

We are in a timeframe that leaves us on our own and then even though it is survival of the richest or healthiest, we have collectively been engineered to have a mob mentality on so many topics, tied to the drug companies, the government overreach, the cancel culture in academia, in the sciences and medicine.

Watching bats almost 30 years ago from a ledge overlooking a Vietnamese village, I am here now, in a world that is, to use the pejorative, more than just batty. Or bats in the belfry.

+–+

Big-eared, Pearson’s horseshoe, round-leaf, Himalayan whisked, Chinese rufous, large myotis, all bats we identified, in their indignant struggle to get out of our nets and our gloved hands.

A rush, for sure, since my bat days started when I was seven, in a cabana on the Costa del Sol. I was enlisted to shoo away or capture a bat that had gotten into the little hideaway my family had rented for two weeks in Spain.

But really, bats and I started at age half a year. After my birth in California, my family took us to the Azores. Imagine that, the only mammal endemic to the islands is a bat — the Azores noctule (Nyctalus azoreum) found in the dry forests of the Azores. That was also in my dreams as a four-month-old and 4-year-old, all products of those shadows and darks shades the skies when we went out for evening walks, first me in a stroller and then pumping chubby legs to keep up with adults.

Always looking up. Avian and aerial lives of my dreams and thoughts. Even as a diver 16 years later, I’d go 90 feet down, and then, stop, looking up at life, at oceanic life with a sun filtering through. Inside the riot, part of the riot of marine life. Water is soul craft.

Bats’ destinations were always in my mind. Where do they come from? How do they hunt at night? Where do they mate? What do they eat?

Batty conversations later in life were tied to the bats under Lake Austin, in Texas, and the big rush of bats at Carlsbad Canyons. Bats were always on my mind, I guess since I was a child on the Azores when an old skinny, dory-exhausted, bent-over fisherman  whose name I have forgotten showed me and my sister that one bat species – later in my life filed away as,  “Kingdom: Animalia ; Phylum: Chordata; Class: Mammalia; Order: Chiroptera; Family: Vespertilionidae; Genus: Nyctalus.”

He had it in a huge off-green glass jar. I watched it flutter, trying to escape the prison and the photons.

Always watching the science journals for any new news on bats, that was me. In 2011, lo and behold, in that  same locale where I had been seven years earlier, three new bat species were “discovered” in Vietnam.

A small one, for sure, of the tube-nosed variety. Leave it up to the Hungarian scientist with the Natural History Museum to call it a tiny demon — “We chose the name Beelzebub to reflect the dark ‘diabolic’ coloration of the new species and its fierce protective behavior in the field,” said Gabor Csorba of the museum.

All the bats I held at bay had fierce dispositions. A given, really, since their modus operandi is to survive, and get out of the clutches of the evil demon, Homo sapiens. As I knew in 1994, bats represent a third of the known mammal species in South East Asia. As is true now,  the correct number of bat species in the region may be twice current count.

I must have held a hundred individual bats inside those caves.

End, Part One!

surfing the Israel-First- dominated Netflix for flicks will paint you into a echo chamber of Hell on Earth!

Yep, that is not an antisemitic thing, the subtitle, or the rest of I write herin. You know, some of us have looked critically at the media: I’m a journalist who actually took real journalism classes, did the lab newspaper in Tombstone, did the editing and reporting for the Daily Wildcat in Tucson for UofA, did an internship in Phoenix, and worked for dozens of newspapers, in small and large cities. Every reporting beat possible . . .

Studying for a masters to teach college writing and composition and other cool courses like beginning news writing, literature, film, poetry fiction, and more, yes, I did a deep dive into Media, Media studies, scholarship around the Press and entertainment, et al.

Yep, aspiring novelist with a New York literary agent, I studied that arena, big time. Who controls publishing, and why, and how . . . . You betcha it isn’t antisemetic to point out a spade when you see one!

Union organizing in Seattle for the big Purple One, SEIU, more insight into who and why they are in unions . . . and today, or last night, that is, come on, I am not seeing anything in the TV or limited series Landia on Jewish extremists in Israel, or elsewhere. I am not seeing deep dramatizations and coverage of what it takes to bomb Gaza and go home and have a chicken and hummus meal. You know, no Meathead “All in the Israeli Family” stuff, for sure. But what material, oy veh, what material for sit-coms and situational dramas. So many crimes there in Isra-Hell, so much of a legacy of criminality, that is, before it was an Isra-Hell state, and up until now. You will find Mossad and Israelis stirring the proverbial dangerous pots everywhere, so, why not a decent look at “them,” instead of all those looks at “us.”??

This is the way of the controllers and the controlled opposition.

Back to my two minutes of hate, and watching a mini-series last night. Getting into something on one of the streaming/screaming channels, I opted for the three-part series on Norway and the Nazi and really just German occupation of that country. Imagine that, 1940, and here we are, 2023, and Norway throws whatever it can to the Nazis in Ukraine. The hatred of Russians and Russia is truly not just schizophrenic, it’s absolutely retarded.

War Sailor,

Yes, a flick which is following a few people: Alfred “Freddy” Garnes (Kristoffer Joner) and his friend Sigbjørn “Wally” Kvalvåg (Pål Sverre Hagen) and Freddy’s wife, Cecilia (Ine Marie Wilmann) and 3 kids. But it is about cognitive dissonance for me, since Norway is a duplicitious place, before NATO it was, but now, and a dangerous place for sure. Who would have thunk they support Germany today, the largest economy in the EU, a la Brussels. Bandera, all those Azov Nazi’s, and here we are, 2023: Finland now a nuclear power, soon, that is, as a lapdog of USA USA.

The statistic is that was one out of nine merchant saliors were killed at sea by the Germans, and their U-Boats, and they were hitting merchant ships, with civilians, many of whom were oufitted with kids, since Norway conscripted boys at age 16, and some were younger.

Quite a death, at frigidity and drowning at sea, with a torpedo hit, all the explosions, all the fires, the steaming engine oil on skin, sizzling hot metal, shards bursted into all directions.

My namesake is my grandfather, and I have written about him. Paul Haeder was a Navy pilot in World War I, from Dortmund, in Germany. Young and forced to train 18 months on a three mast tall ship. Then pilot school, and tri-planes.

He was on the Rostock in the Battle of Jutland, and that ship went down in the largest Naval Battle ever, and he was in the water with a broken jaw holding up a wounded soldier who had his left leg blown off.

They watched the battle from the water, and then the Axis and Allies picked up their dead and wounded with that proverbial white flag.

The sickenss of the merchants of death (never call those sons of bitches and bitches “CEOs of the Military Industrial Complex,” or call them “heads of defense companies” — they are all to be hated, scorned, and they are evil, ending up on all levels of Dante’s Circles of Hell) includes now idiots on Fox and CNN, and then machos like Scott Ritter (he’s not all bad in some of his “stuff”) talking about Ukraine and Russia. And, hell, all those others with podcasts and blogs who write and broadcast in those cold, heartless ways about the meat grinder, about the lies and propaganda of Ukraine and the countless analyses of the EU, USA, UK, Russia. Ritter is okay when he is emotional about the Nazi’s in Ukraine, and his own name listed on a kill list which has been approved, essentially, by USA USA Make America Great Again.

This is virtually fucked on a dozen levels. Dozens. Don’t get me started, man, from the people I meet in the beach community I live in, to people who I publish literature with, they are pure war mongers, selective seeing-hearing-speaking. Shame on them, and they are virtually war mongers in Democrat Party goofball clothes.

Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector and ex-Marines intelligence officer, joins Max Blumenthal to explain how the US has supported online kill lists maintained by the Ukrainian government. Blumenthal and Ritter address the malign objectives behind their own inclusion on such lists.

Battle of Jutland, and it was big: Jutland: The Great Naval Duel of WWI, The Battle of Jutland was the only major clash of battleships in World War I, fought in the North Sea near Denmark in 1916. Go to the CIA Wikipedia for more information.

So, watching this series and the drama and the fear those civilians displayed, and the look into their wanting to head out and go “AWOL” even though they were not in the Norweigan military, and then the PTSD of some of the characters.

The U-Boat scene where four Norweigans are on flotsam planks, one 16 year old with a blown-off leg, well, the Krauts gave them morphine, a kit with canned food, and that was it.

The boy was euthanized with the morphine, and one of the Norweigans, a religious nut, was going crazy about the two other Norweigian men being Satan, the devil’s workers for putting the boy out of his misery.

Then, a little slice of some other stuff tied to British bombing a Danish school – Freddy’s wife and children and others in an apartment building were bombed by British airmen.

This is a chapter of World War II that’s not discussed often, particularly not in the United States. In 1940, Germany occupied Denmark. During this time, the Danish government and King were able to rule until Germany put the country under direct military occupation in 1943. That was the state of Denmark when the bombing happened two years later.

The Danish resistance was supposed to bomb the Gestapo headquarters in Aarhus. It was a plan that saw the resistance align itself with the British. And on some level, it worked. Operation Carthage resulted in the destruction of Gestapo headquarters, the release of 18 prisoners, and the disruption of Nazi activities. But part of the raid was mistakenly aimed at a nearby school.

In the middle of the raid, a de Havilland Mosquito — a type of British aircraft — hit a lamp post. That miscalculation was enough to damage the plane’s wing, causing it to crash into the Jeanne d’Arc School. The horror didn’t stop there. Several other bombers in the second and third waves mistakenly took the school for their target.

This onslaught resulted in the deaths of 125 civilians. Eighteen of those victims were adults, many were nuns, and a staggering 86 of those deaths were children. It’s a truly chilling story that Borndahl captures.

So, today, with April 3 hitting the news cycle, all the lying and whoring politicians, military midgets, all the Blinkens and the merchants of war and hell talking about war drumming and China. This is the sickness of a brain dead society — brain dead through delusionial thinking, stupidty in the media, the limelight disease, the amazingly amnesiatic way of the rabid dogs of America, from Elon Musk giving Starlinks to Ukrainians (that’s a merchant of death with a pot pipe) and now his Space X is pumping satellites into space for US military’s grid of defense-offense tools to dominate the world. These are war criminals, muder profiteers, but worse — cold, steely eyed misanthropes who get money thrown at them, get on TV and cable new for endless attention, and they are less honorable than a sicario or punk Juarez hit man/ hit child. Now look at this toad, and this is what passes as staged nothingness, with little Botox and and bubble brain-assed women and men in Mainstream Mush Media fawning: Cruz, or Rubio, or a ten thousand strong cabal of freaks that get 99 percent of cable and TV news attention, all to be hated daily.

Yes, so, I truly believe these people are cancers, but worse, viruses, and prions like Mad Cow Diseased burgers fed to us, even we vegetarians can’t get away from the dirty meat grinding freaks.

And the broken and broken records on UkroNaziLandia, or if you call it, Land of the New David-Churchill.

Then, the bubbling bravado humor of Ray McGovern, and can he get on another shtick:

They all are economic hitmen, all ex-CIA/Colonels/Spies, now seeing the light, what this freak show calls Redemption, and in the shadows, in the place of elephants in the room, the Neocons, the destroyers of Goyim, of cultures.

Again, there is no hatred for these people, and they need to be hated — all of the Neocons, all the administrations, all the beknighted ones in any POTUS cabinet, and then the manure piles in media-banking-finance-entertainment-press-education- et al, they are the spores killing us all not so softly: Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is the BSE of mad cow disease throughout the land. They need to be HATED and eradicated, and I know I know, such terrible words from a socialist-anarchist!

More more more of that old time “I had my coming to Jesus-Moses-Allah-Money moment: “Retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich argues America’s leaders are woefully out of touch with reality, and unable to adapt to a changing world. Unless they are wrenched from power, the twilight of the American empire will be one filled with catastrophe after catastrophe. Andrew Bacevich is a retired army colonel and Emeritus Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University. He is also the cofounder and president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.”

In the end, these are the worst of times:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Yep, so, I have so many military people under my belt — as a military dependent for Marvin, CW4 Haeder, both in the Air Forde and US Army. My own shit hole time in the military. All the newspaper reporting of military folk down at Fort Huachuca and Fort Bliss and Fairchild Airforce Base. Hell I taught at the Sergeants Major Academy at Biggs Field:

And to tell you the truth, even with those homeless veterans I assisted, and most Americans in the military and those who identify as veterans, they are either natural born killers, racist to a Tee, or crocodile tear infants of the patriotic diseased kind. I was with the Starvation Army:

The Salvation Army’s Special Brand of Poverty Pimping

Nothing’s free, man, and the Starvation Army is at its worse.

Again, we do not need Orwell’s two minutes of hate, man, but we need our own agency, our own ability to have higher order thinking AND then still come at them — the controllers, the manufacturers of consent, the PSYOPs rulers, the merchants of death and those money changers — with HATE. Come at them with emotions but with critical discourse.

None of that man. Because this country and Klanada and EuroTrashLandia and United Inbred Kingdom, Australia, Isra-hell, New Zealand, they are a’’ breeding grounds for hate a la Anglo Saxons =

But the hate can be an equal opporutnity emotion. I have people who are dyed in the wool democrats, who think Oprah and Michelle and Barak are the best things since Aunt Jemima gluten free pancake mix and low glycemic fake maple syrup.

Yeah, Zelensky, the new David my ass unless they are meaning, David Ben-Gurion:

The term “terrorist” often gets used as a general-purpose epithet intended to consign a disliked state or group to perpetual isolation and punishment. Used in this way, the label of “terrorist” becomes a substitute for careful analysis of policy toward the state or group in question. Usually, the object of the labeling has indeed used terrorism — but so have many others who don’t get labeled the same way and may even be treated as friends and allies. If the operative notion is “once a terrorist, always a terrorist,” then there are many shady histories that warrant examination.

Consider, for example, as Benjamin Netanyahu — who has flung the “terrorist” label at least as freely as anyone else — is finally being pushed out of the prime minister’s job in Israel, the histories of some of his predecessors. Menachem Begin, who held that job in the late 1970s and early 1980s — longer than anyone except Netanyahu, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Rabin — had an earlier career as a hard-core terrorist. As leader of the Irgun group during World War II, Begin conducted a campaign of attacks, focused principally on British government and police targets, intended to drive the British out of Palestine — while Britain was busy waging a war against the Nazis. 

Here, some reality from Texas Bentley,

A radically different, even disquieting interpretation of what could well be the pivotal battle of this entire conflict. He calls a Ukrainian a spade, a Nazi. He has skin in the game. He’s a Christian Communist. Get over it, readers.

Now, imagine a thousand, or even a hundred, drones swarming across the Front and into a major city full of civilians. If even a few civilians or soldiers were killed by poison gas, how long do you think it would be before videos of them convulsing and choking to death in the streets got on social media and panic starts?  Ukrop media says the drones will be used to sow panic, “in Crimea”, but there are no major population centers within drone range in Crimea. But Donetsk/Makeevka and Gorlovka are literally on the front lines, and heavily populated. It is no secret that there are not enough gas masks for the soldiers here, much less for the civilian population in these cities. If you were a nazi terrorist with a thousand swarming drones and chemical weapons, where would you use them? In the empty rubble of Bakmut? The open fields on the way to Melitopol? Or in the major cities of Donbas?

I am not a military genius, but I have read Sun Tsu, Von Clauswitz, Patton, Rommel, and Che Guevara. I have studied history. And I have played a lot of chess,  and I have learned from all of the above. I am, as Scott Ritter recently pointed out, not an “intelligence officer”, but unlike Ritter, I am intelligent. As a combat veteran, I have learned that the most important skill a soldier can have is to clearly see and analyze reality, and from this understanding, be able to predict what the enemy will do next, by putting myself in my enemy’s position and asking myself what I would do if I were him.

Book review of Gary Brumback, Life’s Triangles and America’s Power Elites (2019)

Paul Haeder:

Americans are in their own tight spot now: keeping on the lights, fridge half full, Super Bowl projected on plasma TV, the latest model of Jeep in the driveway, work that eats at the soul and the body.

 To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

—Auguries of Innocence, by William Blake

There is an American Native game, counting coup, which is both rarefied and possibly the answer to the male testosterone/female co-opting of testosterone that has given rise to Civilizational humanity since the so-called fertile crescent gestated the evil arts of subjugating man, woman, child and ecosystems to a small cabal of landowners (sic) who got humanity to work for food.

I always go to Daniel Quinn and other neotribalists to look at the long-range, way back, to give some justification to a tribal and hunter-gatherer past that for many of us is locked in our genes, accessible to fewer and fewer people daily as the world becomes a landmine of DNA-warping, cell-depleting, culture-sapping madness orchestrated by white men (mostly).

In our cultural mythology we see ourselves as having left tribalism behind the way modern medicine left the leech and the bleeding bowl behind, and we did so decisively and irrevocably. This is why it’s so difficult for us to acknowledge that tribalism is not only the preeminently human social organization, it’s also the only unequivocally successful social organization in human history. Thus, when even so wise and thoughtful a statesman as Mikhail Gorbachev calls for “a new beginning” and “a new civilization,” he doesn’t doubt for a single moment that the pattern for it lies in the social organization that has introduced humanity to oppression, injustice, poverty, chronic famine, incessant violence, genocide, global warfare, crime, corruption, and wholesale environmental destruction. To consult, in our time of deepest crisis, with the unqualified success that humanity enjoyed here for more than three million years is quite simply and utterly unthinkable.

— Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Adventure 

What’s lovely about my own intersection with Gary Brumback – the author of the book this review-dash-screed is enveloping: Life’s Triangles and America’s Power Elites: Can the Living Field be Leveled?  — is that Gary reached out to me and solicited my comments and possible endorsement of this book (he’s a regular contributor to Dissident Voice), through the auspices of one of modern civilization’s double-edged swords – the world wide internet.

I think it’s both unreal and uniquely human to reach out across the digital universe, and when someone who is connected to me through my words, and finds some linkage, then I believe that’s sign enough to make some connection deeper, or revealing.

It’s gutsy for this 84-year-old former organizational psychologist to have reached out to me (I’m not now your typical thinker and writer), and the proof is in the pudding when it comes to his writing and then how the diner/reader of those ideas, through the grist of his words and grammar (courses) gets the true taste (or terroir) of the author’s (chef’s) orchestration of ideas and composition.

As many readers of my work know, I am captivated by holism and systems thinking, and many times I am looking at life – universalities — through my own optics. I understand the drive to want to understand how tidal wetlands work and how elephant seals can go down 7,770 feet for up to two hours without succumbing to the bends or nitrogen narcosis.

But inherent in that learning and yearning, I understand the power of attracting forces, both physics and metaphysics, and the value in coincidences, both mathematical and magical, and more and more, daily, I am grasping the reasoning for my own living and thinking and breathing. Here I am on the Oregon Coast (central) just having done my first day’s class to be a certified marine mammal (and to help tourists/visitors understand the other zoological and ecological concerns) naturalist. I was about to fiddle with my short story collection which is coming out in several months from Cirque Press, and I was also prepped to blog from my post here in Otis, Oregon.

Instead, I answered the email call from Gary to take a look at his book and write up something. What interests me most about fellows like Brumback is his tenacity to not only understand the world around him using a variety of tools from his 84 years on the planet, but also his desire to be one among us as writers – anti-authoritarian thinkers who deeply question the role of this country in the upsetting of people and cultures throughout the globe.

“Call of Duty” is what I see my role now turning 62 next week. I have engendered good will and hard learning in thousands of students, at public gatherings where I “ran the show” (a hat off to Ed Sullivan) and in my writing, big and small. I’ve written three-parts to my hell-hole experience working with homeless veterans at the Starvation Army in Oregon. But in reality, the linchpin for me is my call of duty, call and answer, to carry forth in any way possible, the message of revolt. Speaking of revolt, I remember hanging out with Robert Bly on two occasions – one time in El Paso as we made it over to Juarez for tequila, and another time 23 years later in Spokane with bourbon and quietude. I wrote a promo article for his appearance in Spokane as part of Get Lit!. His poem, “Call and Answer,” is powerful, even at 17 years old.

I bring this up as a tangent to describe some of what I interpret as the core value in Gary’s new book:

Call and Answer

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?

I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense
Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!”

We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t
Escape from silence? If we don’t lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.

How come we’ve listened to the great criers—Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass—and now
We’re silent as sparrows in the little bushes?

Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.

It is the Saturday of my life, most likely, as I just spent sometime at Cascadia Head, where the Salmon River and the Pacific Ocean battle it out during the various tides ebbing and flowing. Alone, with harbor seals popping their heads up, and their partner, a river otter, watching me look at two bald eagles looking for seal placenta to gobble up.

Here, visiting Canadian photographer Isabelle Hayeur who is on a residency at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, is shooting the Oregon Coast. The Canadian is here on the Pacific Coast of Oregon for first time, and her residency continues her exploration of water and land, people and ecosystems — to show the changes to the ecosystems caused by humans. Here, that Cascadia Head shot and the Salmon hitting the Pacific near Lincoln City, Oregon.

I know for sure as the colluding forces of capitalism – a real misanthropy of both the mind and body – eat at my exterior, the very simple act of movement — with my plodding bag of bones — if I am to survive in this sick world of capitulation of both parties working to mine the last corpuscles of the workers and working class — is sometimes herculean. It’s my Saturday, as Bly states, but I am not sure of this writer Gary’s place in time, if it’s Thursday for him, or Sunday.

I’m not saying this is the 84-year-old Brumback’s position, but I know his clarion calls are what Bly states clearly in these stanzas from this small poem –

We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t
Escape from silence? If we don’t lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.

Brumback is looking to reach those angels of our better selves, and he is wanting the cries of great writers and thinkers, alive and passed on, to push out the silence that is engulfing the entire body politic and public of this ripped-off-land-and-killing-natives country that has made more than a trillion pacts with the devil, a foundation that daily reverberates as the grand Faustian bargain of keeping silent for the few spoils of capitalism.

Americans are in their own tight spot now: keeping on the lights, fridge half full, Super Bowl projected on plasma TV, the latest model of Jeep in the driveway, work that eats at the soul and the body. The bargain, I believe, Brumback is not so quick to go quietly into the night, as this book uncovers the full weight of an old man’s lamentations and ruminations.

His book is compelling for those young minds that have been colonized and whose hearts and souls have been metastasized by consumer culture, the true bedrock of capitalism. Small intonations of the country’s history and this current manifestation of corruption are the drumbeats to his march forward in this quickly drawn book of very big historical ideas unleashed for the uninitiated mind.

Back to the that Native American counting coup allusion I begin with: It’s sort of what I see unfolding as my own literary device while reading Brumback’s book, Life’s Triangles and America’s Power Elites. “Coup” for the Lakota and others was counted to establish position in the tribal honor system. Status mattered, and competition to count the greatest coup was intense. Here’s the beauty of this bravery – getting close enough to touch an enemy with a coup stick without causing him harm.

The self-styled book is by former organizational psychologist Brumback, who counts his own coup many times in this book, as he wanders through the history of the United States, with both whimsy and with a Quaker’s eye toward justice. He uses a variety of wide angle and telephoto angles in order to look deeper at the simple equation of the rich — with military might behind them — controlling the destiny of the country – us, its inhabitants – and the insecurity of the planet, from all the other inhabitants of 192 countries plus the flora and fauna of the planet’s Gaia.

Here, for the Lakota, killing an enemy far away or at long range did not count as a coup. Moreover, winning by overwhelming numbers counted as a “non coup.” Bravery involving a solitary warrior in a headlong battle charge that was climaxed by touching, with no lethal tap of a stick, now that was a coup, as Indians harmlessly touched an enemy with wooden sticks for the purpose of counting coup.

In so many ways, Brumback’s book “touches”—counts coup — upon the enemies of humankind, with myriad of histories of this country since first contact with those Lakota, et al. The writer delves into the mess of the United Snakes of America utilizing quick riffs while cracking open these causal relationships of greed, power, hierarchy, elitism, pathology in this country’s early years and now advancing into today’s predatory capitalism and parasitic economics (or our Shock Doctrine derived from our Monroe Doctrine), Brumbuck is interested in.

He’s also demonstrating another sort of intellectual “counting coup” in a sense since Brumback touches the enemy with his own touchstones and short pithy points connecting to the current state of global affairs.

His goal, it seems, is to consolidate a lot of his writing over his 84 years on planet earth and to codify a body of work he’s studiously read and then to bring himself to some conclusion that there might be some hope for his children and grandchildren. His belief in organizational psychology as a determinant of how bloody sociopathic the not-so-modern corporation is and how that pathology has twisted and turned (morphed) into a gigantic toxic and self-replicating broken set of laws regulating the elite’s projects of domination and extermination is the umbrella covering his writing.

Oscar Wilde is right when defining a cynic in his work, Lady Windemere’s Fan, with Lord Darlington quip : “A person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

From Raj Patel’s first chapter, The Value of Nothing, Patel can help me understand Brumback’s criticism of capitalism and his somewhat of a defense of it in some idealized state that hasn’t yet existed:

From its inception, the free market has spawned discontent, but rare are the moments when that discontent coalesces across society, when a sufficiently large group of people can trace their unhappiness to free market politics, and demand change. The New Deal in the United States and the postwar European welfare states were partly a result of a consortium of social forces pushing for new limits to markets, and a renegotiation of the relationship between individuals and society. What’s new about this crisis is that it’s pervasively global, and comes at the last moment at which we might prevent a global climate catastrophe. But the breadth and depth of both these crises reflect how profoundly our society has been transfixed by free market culture. To understand how this will affect us in the twenty-first century, we need to understand how it began, and to ask why today’s markets look the way they do

Here, the book Gary sent me, in a nutshell, which Brumbuck puts in his own book’s preface:

Here’s a quick overview of this book. It’s a substantial distillation of and addition to my relevant books and articles on the subject.

The first chapter may seem very abstract and academic, but believe me, it is about very real matters, life itself. This chapter lays the groundwork for understanding why the power elite do what they do and what happens when they do it.

The second chapter explains the very nature of power and introduces my concept and illustration of the “power tower” with the elite at the top and the “les Misérables” at the very bottom with several levels in between.

Chapter Three probes what makes the power elite “tick” by looking inside their “black boxes.” When you read this chapter, you will understand that I don’t flippantly ascribe evil motives and evildoing to the power elite.

Chapter Four thoroughly describes and explains the power elite’s “badvantages,” my term for situations and circumstances that give advantage to bad behavior. For example, “our” government gives many handouts to its master, Corporate America.

Chapter Five describes the seemingly limitless bad behavior of the power elite and their functionaries of the corpocracy.

I want to warn you about Chapter Six. It is a true horror story of the consequences of the power elite’s evil doing. By the time you have finished reading this chapter you may be a bit depressed if you believe it is credible. As an antidote I’ll try to inject some homespun humor now and then, starting now. “There is no beating around the Bush, he is what he is.”

And finally, Chapter Seven asks whether the power tower with its power inequality can be changed to the power rectangle with its power equality; in other words, can the living field finally be levelled? This question explains the question mark at the end of the book’s subtitle. Putting there instead an exclamation mark would have been sheer balderdash.

What his book does is galvanize much of his reading – and respect for – other writers who have peered through the looking glass of the Military-Prison-Financial-Ag-Chemical-Education-Legal-Patent-Pharma-Med-IT-AI-Real Estate-Insurance-Education Complex to discover the truths many of us in the anti-authority/ anti-hierarchical/pro-humanity/ pro-universal rights of nature have discovered through our discourse, our deep and fledgling philosophies, and our own experiences in the insanity echo chamber that is modern and post-modern America.

He dedicates this book to Howard Zinn, and Brumback mentions that other books he himself has written could not have been envisioned or codified without the teachings and writings of Zinn:

I am also dedicating this book to the late Howard Zinn, the author of a book on American history that is a must read! I dedicated my previous book to him, which shows how indebted a follower I am. Like my previous book, I could not have written the one you have in your hands were it not for Mr. Zinn’s illuminating history book that tells the true history of America [A People’s History of the United States, 2005]. The power elite understandingly hate Mr. Zinn’s book. The former governor of my home state, for example, was gleeful upon hearing of Mr. Zinn’s death and promptly banned his book statewide from high school curricula. Is it any wonder that my high school history classes in the 1950’s remain the same today, “trivialized, militarized and numbing?”

What I love about this Will Rogersian approach to history Gary brings to this book is the power of his short, deliberate passages outlying the rules and madness that have been fomented in the name of a small elite in this country. He captivates himself in each section, as if new to the material himself, embarking on a self-styled journey to tell what he knows and what he’s read.

This book is a compilation, a Popular Mechanics and Farmer’s Almanac of Brumback’s autobiographical intersection at explaining how capitalism is a game of manipulated vestiges of a global usury past, where Fiefdoms and Kingdoms and unholy alliances of dictators and religions have splayed humankind. No matter where Gary treads, he comes up with the same underpinning for the book, and his other books and probably all his other writings, as well as his own conundrum now in advanced age:

I’ll finally end this long Preface with two questions and an advance notice about my choice of certain nouns and pronouns.

First question: do you think on the one hand that there is a tolerable difference between a handful of evil doers choosing villagers in a far-away land and then bombing them to smithereens in our names and on the other hand the many millions of us letting it happen?

Second question: do you think the surviving loved ones blame the few or us in general? You can tell my answer by my varying use in the text of nouns versus pronouns. For example, instead of writing “the military bombs innocent people,” I will occasionally write “we bomb innocent people” to emphasize that whatever is done by a certain few is being done in our names. Since you might find this practice irritating if I always do it, I will do it only occasionally.

Here in the preface, Brumback sets up the entire tome on a simple proposition – what is done and said by/in Las Vegas/USA stays in/with those living/working/dying in Las Vegas/USA.

The contradiction is blaring, though, as one of my friends, Andre Vltchek states in his humanitarian and global writing – that the rest of the world, that is, the world other than Western Civilization, i.e. Europe/EU, UK, USA, Canada – pays for its/our so-called “higher standard” of living, higher level of economic/environmental/health well-being, and its/our unlimited (seemingly) time to ponder its/our own rotten and degenerate selves.

Through the eyes of someone (Gary’s unblindered eyes, as he states it in his book) in this country, USA, who believes that capitalism somehow can be fixed or somehow is derived from a fair system of checks and balances (however, capitalism always relies on growth and continual growth, antithetical to anything we know about the limits of growth, the finite systems), I venture close to proposing to Gary another set of principles needed to live as Homo Sapiens in this world, tied to retrenchement and a form of ecosocialism, far from any new and improved or regurgitated capitalism: we are living in a closed system of planet earth, and the fragility of the commons (air, water, sea, land, food) now is even more pronounced with ecosystems collapsing (Sixth Mass extinctionon steroids) from over over-harvesting, over-polluting, over-rearranging/razing.

Ecosocialism is Utopian, but so are we as writers and thinkers:

Ecosocialism is a vision of a transformed society in harmony with nature, and the development of practices that can attain it. It is directed toward alternatives to all socially and ecologically destructive systems, such as patriarchy, racism, homophobia and the fossil-fuel based economy. It is based on a perspective that regards other species and natural ecosystems as valuable in themselves and as partners in a common destiny.

Ecosocialism shares with traditional socialism a passion for justice. It shares the conviction that capitalism has been a deadly detour for humanity. We understand capitalism to be a class society based on infinite expansion, through the exploitation of labor and the ransacking of nature.

Ecosocialists are also guided by the life-ways of indigenous peoples whose economies are embedded in a classless society in fundamental unity with nature. We draw upon the wisdom of the ages as well as the latest science, and will do what can be done to bring a new society, beyond capitalism, into existence.

I go back to Andre Vltchek who looks at the polluting effects of capitalism on cultures wide and far, tied to the so-called artist :

You say “European cultural institutions”, and what should come immediately to mind are lavish concerts, avantgardeart exhibitions, high quality language courses and benevolent scholarships for talented cash-strapped local students.

It is all so noble, so civilized!

Or, is it really? Think twice!

I wrote my short novel, “Aurora”, after studying the activities of various Western ‘cultural institutions’, in virtually all the continents of the Planet. I encountered their heads; I interacted with the ‘beneficiaries’ of various funding schemes, and I managed to get ‘behind the scenes’.

What I discovered was shocking: these shiny ‘temples of culture’ in the middle of so many devastated and miserable cities worldwide (devastated by the Western imperialism and by its closest allies – the shameless local elites), are actually extremely closely linked to Western intelligence organizations. They are directly involved in the neo-colonialist project, which is implemented virtually on all continents of the world, by North America, Europe and Japan.

‘Culture’ is used to re-educate and to indoctrinate mainly the children of the local elites. Funding and grants are put to work where threats and killing were applied before. How does it work? It is actually all quite simple: rebellious, socially-oriented and anti-imperialist local artists and thinkers are now shamelessly bought and corrupted. Their egos are played on with great skill. Trips abroad for ‘young and talented artists’ are arranged, funding dispersed, scholarships offered.

Carrots are too tasty, most would say, ‘irresistible’. Seals of approval from the Empire are ready to stamp those blank pages of the lives of still young, unrecognized but angry and sharp young artists and intellectuals from those poor, colonized countries. It is so easy to betray! It is so easy to bend.

Please note I am not comparing Gary or his book to other writers or their books/writing, some of whom he cites liberally throughout this latest one. I believe in a new way of book analysis, or reviewing a book – by putting myself into the stream of consciousness that cascades for someone like myself who in the process of reading will take to heart how closely or far away that content resonates with my own life and my own writing. It is the power of a book like Gary’s to incite not only my own deep introspection about what it means to be an American, someone who has worked (albeit struggled by not getting bought and sold by corporate America, but still . . . sold down the river in the careers I’ve held), but also what it means to be counter to almost anything and everything this country produces as a national collective consciousness.

His thesis for the book is tied to his own backing of organizational psychology. He uses these equations to illustrate where he’s coming from:

Anyone’s Equation:
Person + Context = Person’s Behavior + Consequences

Any Organization’s Equation:
Organization + Context = Organization’s Behavior + Consequences

Any Nation’s Equation :
Nation + Context = Nation’s Behavior + Consequences

Of course, every person, every organization, every nation has their own equations, sort of like a unique DNA code. The specific details in any equation can change from day to day, except some of the details for chronic habits like that of America’s endless warring and spying change less.2 A nation, therefore, over the entire course of its history may have gone through zillions of its more significant equations with varying details in the input side.

Thus, what anyone, any organization or any nation do throughout their lives depends on themselves and their contexts. Behavior never happens without both and will never be fully explained without both.

Beyond his background in psychology, Brumback looks to his writing now as a way to express his historical knowledge of America’s bloody programs of subjugation and to militate his belief in non-violence as he was reared as a Quaker.

He sets up the book by talking about his background working with organizations, treating them sort of speak to heal themselves, which in the end he sees as impossible under the current structures of limited liability companies and the bigger transnational corporations that are rapacious in every way.

Brumback alludes to working a long time for industry, the US federal government and non-profit research business. The power of the company man, and his own background in academics (a rather conservative and lock-step group think cabal), he admits, muted his criticism of the Viet Nam War as he was then (1960-75) fearful of endangering his career and his family.

He talks of being a “recovering” academese reader, writer and talker, and his book is far from any sort of style found in the pedantic journals where members of the nefarious the American Psychology Association dump their stories on.

Brumback: This book is therefore as deliberate ‘street write’ as I can make it, a conversation, although one-way with you.

Interestingly, he gives us 12 Facts (as seen in a Jan. 23, 2019 Dissident Voice piece) that are not truths that have embedded into the American mindset, the American propaganda of historical warping, lying and outright censorship. There is a reason why this country goes into zombie or dervish mode when two multi-billion dollar organizations, Rams and Patriots, under the umbrella of a white patriarchy elitism called the NFL, watching entitled, redneck or mute millionaire players whose ultimate contribution to society is to sell cars, beer, Viagra and the lies of empire on their way to permanent Traumatic Brain Injury hell.

• False Fact: The American Revolution was fought to free the people from suppression by King George and his chartered corporations.
• False Fact: “We the people of the United States——-do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
• False Fact: We are the “United States of America.”
• False Fact: America is a democracy.
• False fact: America’s Civil War was fought to free the slaves.
• False fact: America’s wars have been unavoidable and just.
  False Fact: Whistleblowers are traitors.
• False Fact. Our nation’s military represents the best this country has to offer.
• False Fact. America’s war veterans are heroes.
• False Fact: To rationalize its own excesses, including its hand-outs from the government, corpocratic capitalists spout the theory of trickle-down economics as a rationalization for their own hefty welfare benefits, arguing that more money at the top will eventually trickle down to the bottom in the way of jobs.
• False Fact: The rich say the poor get what they deserve.
• False Fact. Public services need to be privatized because government is inefficient and costly.

In many ways, Brumback has both fun moments and sarcastic fluidity with these American exceptionalist delusions throughout his book, but he is serious about launching a straightforward attack on the elite’s continual degradation of the citizenry of this country: hollowing out our “symbolic democracy” through the systematic formula of penury, debt slavery, theft of the commons resources, the rapacious appetite to despoil ecosystems and communities, the socializing of the externalities of their dirty businesses and then in turn privatizing all the profits; and, finally, their basically illegal, unethical and unconstitutional ways of going about their wealth and political power accumulation.

What I like best about this book is the earnestness that Brumback brings to the page. He is there to guide the reader into the hall of mirrors and house of horrors that embody America. He is a troubadour for truth and unraveling the seemingly complexities of the elite’s rule over the majority, the 90 percent of us who are not any part of the Point Zero Zero One percent’s project of human annihilation.

In the end, Brumback hits back at the idea of nature versus nurture, at the very end of the book:

Recall in Chapter 3 that I included genetics as an input in the black box. Our genetic history simply can’t be denied. But when it comes to being bad or good morally speaking, what do we know about the role of genetics, and does it really matter?

Psychologist Stephen Mason concludes that “some people are, quite simply, born bad.”

Not so concludes psychologist Dacher Keltner. “He finds that positive emotions lie at the core of human nature.

Two diametrically opposed conclusions. My conclusion is that while babies are innocent at the instant of birth because they have not had time to behave badly, some will eventually do so habitually, and some won’t. What role nature plays in influencing their behavior is immaterial in my opinion. What matters from a practical standpoint is the question of how to deal with the resulting wrongdoing.

What’s your opinion?

While we can argue over epigentics and the complete failure of the human seed and human semen to produce unadulteratedly since the products of capitalism, i.e. toxins, from Teflon to aromatic particulates, from Atrazine to PCBs, from glyphosate to flame retardant, from mercury to cesium, have overtaken humanity and all zoological systems.

Is Donald Trump, the sociopath that he is, friend and abuser with Jeffrey Epstein and Roy Cohn, and that Donald whose father is in a Woody Guthrie song for the old man’s racism, well, is that president (sic-sic) who represents the ills of the father and the unfettered protection of his elite class and the muscle of his casino thugs, is Donald, with NPD (narcissistic personalty disorder), responsible for his hatred, racism, lies, and power hunger? Or is it his upbringing, or his mama’s womb months, or the people around him?

That’s the crux of the book, really: Brumback is asking the reader to judge for ourselves the depth of the conspiracy of the rich toward absolute control of the majority. Is there true evil in the world, or are all children borne of original sin?

Those toxins and carcinogenics and structural violence systems were created, marketed, sold, defended, patented by men/women, in corporations. The socipathic definition of a corporation is the same as the person, but can we give a free ride to the majority of people in the corporation who are just to recoin my favorite phrase, Little Eichmanns?

In any sense, the embodiment of the Hudson Bay Company is the message in the Heart of Darkness, which reflects the individual as sociopath and the LLC as sociopathic, as the amorality of corporations is obvious from a million cases we all can tap into from the written record. That these companies — polluters — have gained personhood is compelling, from the start of this country’s slide deeper and deeper into the morass of capitalism — set forth 133 years ago in 1886 in the Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, This obscure case set the precedent that corporations have some rights under the 14th Amendment and were given de-facto personhood.

So, then, we have given corporations even higher status in this personhood allusion/legal definition in the Citizens United Case . What sort of person is a corporation?

Are they philanthropic and kind to their neighbors or are they the kind of people who will slit your throat to take your wallet?

For most of us in the Brumback class, we see the very nature of the corporation as both amoral and sociopathic.

They exist to make money, regardless of the social consequences. And they have gotten legal protections from the consequences of their crimes — a true Mafioso or cartel paying off the politicians and the cops and judges to gain unimaginable wealth and power over us, the 90 percent.

A sociopath and a corporation have identical incentive structures and motivations:

• Both sociopaths and corporations exist for the sole purpose of self-centered goals—sociopaths want a variety of things (money, power, sex, etc.) while corporations are solely focused upon making money.
• Neither has an internal sense of morality and, barring intervention from a more powerful authority, both are willing to exploit others in service of their goal; just as how a sociopath may be willing to lie, cheat and steal their way through life, a corporation is willing to use child sweatshop labor to depress costs.
• Both sociopaths and corporations are constrained through risk/reward analysis—sociopaths weigh the value or pleasure of doing something immoral against the legal/social risks, while corporations weigh the profit of their actions against the cost of legal/social actions against their agenda.

In the end, we have to develop both sensitivities and thick skins in this gambit called This American Life. Brumback makes his claim to some of those contradictions and dichotomies in his book. He can be contacted by the reader here for more information on ordering the book. Gary Brumback.

I sign off with the words of Eduardo Galeano whose Memory of Firetrilogy sets deep in my soul. From an interview:

I want to be an honest man and a good writer, as James Baldwin was. I greatly admired him. He once told a story that I used in the third volume of Memory of Fire. He was very young, and he was walking down the street with a friend, a painter. They stop at a red light. “Look,” says the friend. Baldwin sees nothing, except a dirty pool of water. The friend insisted: “Look at it, really.” So Baldwin takes a good look and sees a spot of oil spreading in the puddle. In the spot of oil, he sees a rainbow, and the street moving, and people moving in the street; and he sees madmen and magicians and the whole world moving. The universe was there in that little pool. On that day, Baldwin said, he learned to see. For me, that’s an important lesson. I am always trying to look at the universe through the little puddles in the streets.

This Land is Their Land, and We Are the Illegal Aliens
by Paul K. Haeder

RE: April 7, 2006

Man oh man, that’s 17 year ago, and boy isn’t that a huge passage of time.

Today, the 31st of March?

“The fight for equality must be fought on many fronts — in urban slums, in the sweatshops of the factories and fields,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., in a telegram to Chavez after a UFW electoral victory. “Our separate struggles are really one — a struggle for freedom, for dignity, and for humanity.” 

The roots of Chavez’s effectiveness lay in his ability to connect on a human level. 

“He never owned a house. He never earned more than $6,000 a year. Yet more than 40,000 people marched behind the plain pine casket at his funeral, honoring the more than 40 years he spent struggling to improve the lives of farm workers.” 

Chavez was once asked: “What accounts for all the affection and respect so many farm workers show you in public?” 

He replied: “The feeling is mutual.”

Well well, into Spring 2023 and the madness and insanity have overtaken all parts of the Collective (delusional) West . . . So, anything around heroes like Chavez and Dolores Huerta, completely lost in the slip-stream of censorship. This schizophrenia, mass psychosis, collective Stockholm Syndrome, Infantilization, Hollywood-ization of education (sic); the Trump derangement syndrome, the China Will Get All the Minerals and Oil and Food psychosis; the slippage of detante, the lingering manure smell of people from the Ivy League to the elite league . . . Rough and tumble idiots with millions in their pockets.

You know, a world where there are no kids marching against Nato, Proxy Wars, against the Impending nuclear war. A continuing Criminal Enterprise and the Protection Rackets, all of that, on top of the mish-mash of self-collapsing arguments, and I can only imagine what the K12 students are mixing with their Pabulum today . . .Thanks goodness for Newsome:

California Assembly Bill 418 (or AB 418) is looking to stop the manufacture, distribution or sale of any food products in the state that contain either the chemical potassium bromate, red dye No. 3, propylparaben, brominated vegetable oil or titanium dioxide.

These chemicals are found in popular foods like Skittles, Nerds, Little Debbie baked goods and Starburst.

Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel introduced the bill, saying in a press release Californians shouldn’t have to worry the food they buy “might be full of dangerous additives or toxic chemicals.”

Unchecked suburbanization. The Military Industrial Complex a la California. You know, this is it for the Collective California. Yep, booze, burgers and bottles of Coke, A-okay for the child. All those video games, all the propaganda mush of Holly-Dirt, and, well, we know what Capitalism is about, no? It all is smoke and mirrors, green washing and green porn . . . And worse.

Is the Newsome or the politicians going to ban military recruiters in California? No more flyover jets during all those Sunny California games? Is San Diego going to refuse nuclear powered subs and carriers and their payloads, too, from entering the waters of Sunny Southern Californa?

Skittles, man, and this is the insanity of incremental IQ plummeting. From grape boycott to Little Debbie muffins.

Dolores Clara Fernandez was born on April 10, 1930 in Dawson, a small mining town in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Her father Juan Fernández, a farm worker and miner by trade, was a union activist who ran for political office and won a seat in the New Mexico legislature in 1938. Dolores spent most of her childhood and early adult life in Stockton, California where she and her two brothers moved with their mother, following her parents’ divorce.

According to Dolores, her mother’s independence and entrepreneurial spirit was one of the primary reasons she became a feminist. Dolores’ mother Alicia was known for her kindness and compassion towards others. She offered rooms at affordable rates in her 70 room hotel, which she acquired after years of hard work. Alicia welcomed low-wage workers in the hotel, and often, waived the fee for them altogether. She was an active participant in community affairs, involved in numerous civic organizations and the church. Alicia encouraged the cultural diversity that was a natural part of Dolores’ upbringing in Stockton. The agricultural community where they lived was made up of Mexican, Filipino, African-American, Japanese and Chinese working families. (source)

Here I am, digging up from the graveyard of Haeder polemics, from Dissident Voice, in my early days writing stuff that got published by “them.”

It makes sense to revive the concept of, we all are illegal aliens, the conquest of discovery, in a time of plagues: i.e. the fools and fascists stopping Chicano studies and Black studies and all sorts of very critical new-revisionist history to flip the script on the White Man’s Burden.

This is at the heart of 50 or 60 percent of Americans. Of every color:

“We are all illegal aliens.” It’s a bumper sticker many of us on the frontlines of the fight against the United States’ government’s assault on Central Americans plastered on our car bumpers down El Paso way.

Flipping the script:

That was in the 1980s.

You know, when Reagan was running amuck ordering his captains Ollie North, McFarland, Casper Weinberger, the whole lot of them, to send bombs, CIA-torture manuals and US agents in order to aid terrorist contras and other despotic sorts in killing hundreds of thousands of innocents in civil wars in Salvador and Guatemala and El Salvador.

We worked with women and children who had witnessed fathers, uncles and husbands eviscerated by US-backed military monsters. Victims of torture, in Texas illegally. You know, what those brave Smith and Wesson-brandishing, chaise-lounge Minutemen of today would call aliens.

We worked with people in faith-based communities, mainstream churches, and non-profits throughout El Paso, Juarez and the general area known as La Frontera. Everyone I met working with in this refugee assistance stint had humanitarian blood coursing through their veins. We were proud of our law-breaking work — we gave refuge to terrorized and sometimes half-dead civilians.

We were called lawbreakers by the Reaganites and the Minutemen of that time. Communists. Pinko-fags. Those were the good old days of low-tech surveillance and simple FBI lists.

But what we did was human and humane, in the tradition of that very universal (with roots in Quakerism) belief in bearing witness and acting upon that which has been judged as unjust and inhumane.

Of course, we were up against the laws of this land and coarse politically driven judges who denied victim after victim permanent or temporary status while seeking asylum in the US.

We have so many stories of people sent back who were at best imprisoned, and in the worse cases, mutilated, disappeared, and murdered.

Guatemalan and Salvadorans, that is. Your readers don’t want to hear the narratives and visualize the descriptions of photos of those victims of torture. Ghastly things happened to teachers, nuns, medical workers and farmers, more heinous than what we’ve heard happened in the cells of Abu Ghraib.

We were there to assist, but more importantly to bear witness to our country’s terror campaign. Some of us got so riled up that later in our lives — me included — we hoofed it to Central America. Kicked around. Wrote articles for the few newspapers in this country that even cared about poor, misbegotten, displaced people of Latin America.

But no matter how hard-nosed we became, or how much we could withstand the photographs of women’s sliced backs and beheaded fetuses, we couldn’t shake the images of the children of torture at this two-story refugee house, Annunciation House. It was full of scruffy looking East Coast volunteers who had hooked up with Ruben Garcia, the House’s director, through Catholic services organizations. It was their stint with public service, their spiritual duty calling. Part of their degree plans. But most were converted and slammed hard by the violence their charges had suffered under.

Those PTSD-induced cartoons those children drew sucked the air out of even the hard-ass border patrol guys who used to “dump” the Central Americans at Ruben’s door at all hours of the night. Who can believe it now, that once upon a time official INS and border patrol officers knowingly let their perps go — knew that Ruben and his volunteers could salve emotional and physical wounds of these tortured crossers.

Their chance at freedom. Except for the piss-ant judges. And the memories of pregnant aunties being raped, their fetuses cut out alive, speared, and the laughing Reagan-loved military punks in the highlands and jungle.

Annunciation House was bulging at 100 people — disheveled lives jammed in. Beans always cooking. Songs. Mattresses and piles of donated clothes. Guitars strumming. Gueros, the white ones, and the Chicanos would help with in-takes — asylum transcripts, translation, dotting all the i’s and t’s. Help with getting jobs. Odd jobs in the community. Help with making sure the refugees didn’t get caught again.

But it was always those by-the-letter-of-the-law jurists helping confound the torture. More than 70 percent of our brothers and sisters seeking asylum in the US were denied entry by some fat cat, cocaine-sniffing immigration judge who usually had a friend in the back pocket of some Bush or buddy of Bush somewhere.

Then it was trying to get the denied victims off to Canada without being caught. You remember, the Canada back then which used to open its borders to refugees.

The judges and politicians and Minutemen all professed, “Send them back. Those aliens broke our immigration laws.”

But “we are all illegal aliens” as a rejoinder went much further than USA’s mayhem in Mesoamerica. We worked in solidarity with the housekeepers, bricklayers, agricultural workers and so many other worthy Mexicans who worked their butts off in the US for little pay and much less respect.

These were workers who crossed the Rio Grande to find low-paying jobs with American families and businesses — working for mayors, bigwigs, even on government contracts. In Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, elsewhere. With a wink and a smile by the American exploiters.

Mojado — wetback. Squatter. Beaner. Illegal alien. These were the more tame epithets.

But let’s not kid ourselves about the genesis of this new round of empowered Latinos fighting against racist laws put forward by the dispassionate conservatives running the ship of fools in DC.

This is not a country of legal immigrants. It’s a country based on colonialists, undocumented white people who helped displace native tribes through broken laws and genocide.

It’s a country based on illegal occupation of native lands and on Mexico’s lands, pure and simple. Colonialists protected by Federal laws that deemed free white people as the only ones who had the right to be fully-fledged citizens.

Manifest destiny was a violent racist act to seize lands illegally. Everything this country’s current anti-Mexican and pro-Apartheid border war proponents stand upon — all that doctrine and those so-called laws — is based on illegally seizing lands of Native tribes.

And worse — laws that “removed” natives. Laws that starved natives. Laws that approved of eradicating native families, entire tribes.

The current massive turnout of students and workers alike in this country’s major cities is a testament to these Americans’ backbone to fight this new exclusionary law — HR4377 — a Washington, DC-inspired racist act that has its roots in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Many Americans do express a certain humanity and dignity for the people many deem aliens, but it’s not awe-inspiring that some citizens of Denmark or Limerick, Ireland, obey the so-called immigration laws of this country during their initial years as landed immigrants.

Let’s make no bones about the motives of Jim Sensenbrenner, the author of this racist House bill: He sees those brown-skinned south-of-the-border lettuce pickers, linen washers, house framers, and their US-borne children as, what? “Alien gang members terrorizing communities.”

Anyone spouting that we are a nation of immigrants and laws has a disease, what George Orwell called the illness of doublethink.

And until those many white Americans stop spewing that this is their land, a land of their laws, and a land made for Christians, the racist Minutemen will ramp up their gun brandishing on the southern and northern borders. And racist politicians will continue to play on the fears of uniformed constituents and try and pass the 21st Century’s racist exclusionary laws.

I wonder what these modern-day Nazis would say about those children’s cartoons — images of bodies floating in rivers. Blood-soaked church walls. Military men with their M-16s trained on men while others were in their rape hunch. Beautiful jungle birds flying in the sky next to US-paid-for helicopter gun ships spraying the corn fields below. Dead mommies cradling dead babies.

Yeah, I’m an illegal alien. We all are illegal aliens, under the laws of these creeps in high office. Humanity and caring and simple benedictions for suffering so much, those are alien traits only held by a minority in this country of exclusion. Yeah, those creeps on hate-radio and in the newspaper columns and on Capitol Hill, sure, they recognize all of us who see the lies and fight the injustice as aliens.

And the children whose post-traumatic cartoons brought tears to men and women who had been in Vietnam. Simple Crayola colorings brought tears to a county sheriff who had survived drug runners shooting up his town and unearthed bodies.

Yeah, we are all illegal aliens. Except them.

Old bio: Paul Haeder worked in Central America and Mexico writing for newspapers during the 1980s and early 1990s. He’s currently in Spokane, Washington, as an instructor of writing at Spokane Falls Community College and writes sustainability-energy-environmental pieces for the towns weekly, Pacific Northwest Inlander.

+–+

Ahh, another old one revived. I wrote a piece for the El Paso Times, but I can’t find it on the web (I have clips of almost everything I have published in hard copy form).

Rhyming Not Necessary But Some Assembly Required – Poetry

Paul Haeder: With a liberal dose of simile, any number of cultural and natural events hearken the phrase, “Blank is like poetry in action.”

This sense of viral isolation, dread and global make-over (for good and worse) gets the proverbial juices flowing of our local and national bards. It’s not a stretch to say there are many people on our coast and farther east who consider themselves to be “poets.”

With a liberal dose of simile, any number of cultural and natural events hearken the phrase, “Blank is like poetry in action.”

Ever see a dolphin in the wild under water? Ever see Carl Lewis compete in the long jump? Ever see a skateboarder compete in an extreme sports competition? Ever see a peregrine falcon dive at over 220 miles an hour?

“Poetry in action.”

April is deemed National Poetry Month. Through the work of the Academy of American Poets who saw the success of other celebrations such as Black History Month (February) and Women’s History Month (March), writers, poets and teachers helped found Poetry Month.

The aim is simple:

• highlight the extraordinary legacy and ongoing achievement of American poets,
• encourage the reading of poems,
• assist teachers in bringing poetry into their classrooms,
• increase the attention paid to poetry by national and local media,
• encourage increased publication and distribution of poetry books, and
• encourage support for poets and poetry

Where I now live, the Oregon Coast celebrates writers – poets – through conferences, workshops, organizations and, of course, readings. For now, like the summer Olympics, the live lyrical works and in-your-face performances by poets have been cancelled.

However, there are on-line options. Our own count librarians are putting up more resources up and are encouraging poets (and other writers) to record their performances. AAP’s web site has plethora of live filmed readings and activities for young and old.

I asked the Toledo, Oregon, head librarian her take on the written word’s value in a time of crisis. Deborah Trusty stated: “So, the value of literature is great, as it has always been because it speaks to the universal human experiences. ‘Now,’ whenever now is for anyone, is always a good time for literature and an opportunity to contemplate the deeper feelings and experiences of what it means to be a human BEING.”

Yes, poetry can be dreaded, only because it has been poorly taught and presented.

Portland poet Marianne Klekacz states clearly, “ I think many people are intimidated by poetry, a reaction that probably dates back to middle or high school. Elementary school students seem to get it immediately, because, I suspect, they haven’t had the imagination trained out of them yet.”

She told me she once hosted the annual William Stafford birthday party in January and the April Poetry Month readings at the Newport Library. “My book [“When Words Fail”] was published in 2009. It can be found in the library, but since that is now quarantined, if you’ll send me a mailing address, I’d be happy to send you a copy.”

William Stafford is one of the country’s preeminent poets, one whose work is relevant in this time of Covid-19. His son Kim (also a Willamette University faculty member) was poet laureate of Oregon until last year.

Here are some definitions of poetry:

Mary Oliver — “Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.”

Salvatore Quasimodo — “Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.”

Rita Dove — “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”

James K. Baxter — “The poem is a plank laid over the lion’s den.”

When I requested writers in our area to tell me what they believe the value of poetry is, many failed to respond. A sign of poetic solitude? A dystopian look at the world from one of the country’s most beautiful places from which to create words, music, art, dance and more?

Marianne was profuse in her responses, as was the Toledo head librarian. Marianne recommends Peter Sears’ work – he was Oregon’s poet Laureate a few years ago.

She said, “I got involved with poetry late in life, pretty much by accident, and have wallowed in it ever since. I probably have more books of poetry (as opposed to books about poetry) than the Newport Library.”

Poet Leanne Grabel too recommends Sears. “Peter was a friend. I used this in classes often to teach metaphor. Taught in lock-down residential treatment. Kids loved this.” Here is the Sears poem Leanne adores.

My Emptiness Rides in the Back Seat, Propped UP

Don’t look now but that’s my emptiness smiling at us
from the back seat of the car with the hat on that’s too small.
I give him hats that fit and he chucks them out the window.
Then flops over, face down,
probably laughing his eyeballs out. I prop him up.
Maybe I should get him like a baby chair.
Or tape him to the back seat.
Yesterday he caught me looking at him
in the rearview mirror.
That smile, I can’t take it.
I threw fresh mints back over my shoulder at him
as hard as I could.
I threw the towel at him that I use to wipe the windshield
and almost piled into a Dodge 4×4.
That’s it. I stop the car, take him out, sit him
on a wooden bench in the park, and walk back to the car.
Yeah, just leave him there.
He’s my emptiness, I can do what I want with him.
He’s such a baby. Maybe he should have to do it on his own.
Well, I barely get around the block
when I whip the car around and head back for the little whuss.
I mean, how long can he last on his own?
So I am getting out of my car
when I happen to glance at the back seat.
There he is, my emptiness, with one of those dumb hats on,
waving my car keys.

[“Witnessing War, with Carolyn Forché” — The author of What You Have Heard Is True talks about her political education in El Salvador, by Patrick Iber]

Over at Dissent Magazine, there is a great interview of Carolyn Forché.

[“Witnessing War, with Carolyn Forché” — The author of What You Have Heard Is True talks about her political education in El Salvador, by Patrick Iber]

I cut my teeth on Forché. She ended in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s. After, she toured the US — 49 states in a sort of Blitzkrieg of truth telling about the despotic regime in Salvador propped up and trained by USA. Americans doubted her experiences, denying the realities of the death squad imperium of the School of the Americas murder college.

I spoke with her at the University of Arizona where she appeared at the Poetry Center, and I met her years later at a reading at the University of Texas — El Paso. Heck, here is an old Dissident Voice piece I did, This Land is Their Land, and We Are the Illegal Aliens

I ended up working with Salvadoran refugees in El Paso, and that story was written several times, including the El Paso Herald Post which then sent it out to their sister newspapers.

Here, a recent update of that experience with Casa Annunciation, Shifting Baselines in a Time of Climate Change, Systems Stagnation, Life and Death in a Time of Amnesia

Here, some art therapy from some of the children at the refugee center.

Again, there is this huge tension between MFA/masters of fine arts creative writing “poets” living off of tenure track jobs, and those of us who are revolutionary. This poem, by Forché, is powerful, now, and then, 1978:

The Colonel

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves.There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground. –May 1978

“If Capitalism is a disease, then it’s one that eats your flesh — and then profits from selling your bones for fertilizer, and then invests that profit to reap the cane harvest, and then sells that harvest to tourists who pay to visit your headstone.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

And this was back then in the 1880s:

Recognizing her daughter’s intelligence, Keller’s mother sought help from experts including inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who had become involved with deaf children. Ultimately, she was referred to Anne Sullivan, a graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind, who became Keller’s lifelong teacher and mentor. Although Helen initially resisted her, Sullivan persevered. She used touch to teach Keller the alphabet and to make words by spelling them with her finger on Keller’s palm. Within a few weeks, Keller caught on. A year later, Sullivan brought Keller to the Perkins School in Boston, where she learned to read Braille and write with a specially made typewriter. Newspapers chronicled her progress. At fourteen, she went to New York for two years where she improved her speaking ability, and then returned to Massachusetts to attend the Cambridge School for Young Ladies. With Sullivan’s tutoring, Keller was admitted to Radcliffe College, graduating cum laude in 1904. Sullivan went with her, helping Keller with her studies. (Impressed by Keller, Mark Twain urged his wealthy friend Henry Rogers to finance her education.)

Even before she graduated, Keller published two books, The Story of My Life (1902) and Optimism (1903), which launched her career as a writer and lecturer. She authored a dozen books and articles in major magazines, advocating for prevention of blindness in children and for other causes.  

Imagine that, no, and she was written off by a majority of society — a woman, deaf and blind.

And now, 2023? Where would Keller stand? Syria, Vietnam, Libya, Yemen, USA, the constant build up military might, the proxy wars, the 20 years in Iraq? Imagine that, even now, we write off people even after all the Americans with Disabilities activism, the Eunice Shriver’s of the world and Special Olympics, inclusion in schools, all the special education. But socialst, radical, anti-war? Death to Helen, 2023?

In 1909 Keller became a member of the Socialist Party; she actively campaigned and wrote in support of the working class from 1909 to 1921. Many of her speeches and writings were about women’s right to vote and the effects of war; in addition, she supported causes that opposed military intervention.

And yet, and yet, there are other sides to Keller:

Many hearing people, Marxists included, are familiar with Helen Keller in one of two ways. Either we see her as the wild child rescued from the prison of deafness and blindness through the heroic efforts of her “miracle worker” teacher, Anne Sullivan; or as the butt of cruel “Helen Keller” jokes. Neither image bears any relation to the actual, politically active Deaf/Blind woman whom that nearly mythical child became.

In these texts, she explains how she came to Revolutionary Socialism after her graduation from college. Despite her reliance on intermediaries to communicate with the outside world, Comrade Helen Keller is fully her own person.

Helen Keller became a member of the Socialist Pary in 1909 and by 1912, she had become a national voice for socialism and working class solidarity. Her articles and speeches take on a harder edge as the war machine gears up and the reformist tendency in the Socialist Party forced a split with its revolutionary wing. We can see her calling for party unity in 1913, and then breaking publically with reformism and siding wholeheartedly with the IWW in 1916 and taking up the struggle against President Wilson’s hypocritical war machine .

Helen Keller’s work for the cause of socialist revolution continued through the years of the First World War up until 1921. She had been long active in efforts to reduce the causes of blindess and provide relief for the Blind. With the collapse of the Socialist Party’s commitment to revolution and the on-going persecution of the IWW, Keller lost her connections to the workers movement and became increasingly isolated among reformers and government bureaucrats who did not share her political perspectives.

Her own self image was that of a Blind woman who also could not hear. Helen Keller never learned the sign language of the North American Deaf community. Instead she had English sentences manually spelled into her hand and then vocalized her responses. This effectively cut her off from the largely working class Deaf population whose native sign language has a grammar all its own. Blindness at that time often meant unemployment, whereas Deaf workers were integrated into the largely non-English speaking ranks of manual laborers. One can only wonder what might have been if Comrade Keller had found a place in the ranks of politically unorganised Deaf workers in the heady years of the late ’20s and ’30s.

Sadly, her legacy among Deaf and Deaf/Blind people today is one of opposition to their native language rights. Her name stands for the dominance of spoken English over American Sign Language. This is due to her family’s early contact with Alexander Graham Bell and his campaign to wipe out manual communication in favor of the oral education of the Deaf. Her legacy in the larger hearing world today is one of the saccharine sweet triumph of the individual over personal adversity (with the help of a determined educator-hero). Gone is her call for international working-class solidarity and her clear revolutionary vision. Hopefully, this small archive will go some way to recapturing her socialist legacy for the Deaf, Deaf/Blind and hearing workers of the world. (source)

Yeah, there is an FBI file on her. What a world, what a world.

Now, I am thinking about mortality, for sure. I have been around a lot of interesting folk, people who are considered disenfranchised by the beautiful people, but alas, really, in my work in developmental disabilities, I have seen, as an employment specialist, many situations where I did not have to harp on the fact that people living with intellectual-developmental disabilities have the same aspirations of wanting independence and a job and some worthy place in society. Because: well, many of the store and business owners and managers and hiring honchos they themselves have a family member living with a developmental disability.

So, yes, one thirty-eight year old woman, paralyzed from the neck down, and non verbally communicative, got a job after fitted with a specialized chair and machine that she could use with her tongue, to take tickets at a movie theater, and the tongue-mouth computer allowed her to give the movie goers salutations and even recommendations of the movies playing in the 16-theaterplex.

And yet, and yet, so many people I have run into who think drug abusers and highly impacted individuals who are physically, mentally and psychologically damaged from a bad beating or from alcohol in the womb, that those people do not deserve all these government programs and services. Many have said they would love to put a drug-addict into his boat, with a chunk of cement chained to the waist, and let him go and be useful: crab pickings.

I kid you not!! And, we know, that at least drug users are many times drug dealers, and this is the crap and misanthropy we have to absorb daily from the likes of them all, including Trump:

Donald Trump’s White House plans to stop deaths from opioid abuse by putting more drug dealers to death.

The Trump administration is rolling out its plan to solve the opioid crisis Monday, when Trump is expected to visit Safe Station, a drop-in facility for opioid users seeking help and treatment, in Manchester, New Hampshire.

And according to administration officials, part of the plan will be to tell prosecutors to “seek the death penalty against drug dealers when it’s appropriate under current law.”

You know, all those freaks in American politics looking up at Singapore for lashings and harsh prison sentences. Utah lawmakers are pushing for the firing squad to come back. Oh, 2023! This is the way of the misanthrope:

Singapore resumed executions in March 2022, after a two-year hiatus. According to local activists, there are an estimated 60 inmates on death row, most of whom are for drug-related offences. The 64-year old Nazeri bin Lajim has been scheduled for execution by hanging on July 22, 2022. This is the 9th execution scheduled this year, just shortly after the State carried out a double execution on July 7, 2022. VICE World News followed his family in May 2022 to find out how the capital punishment inflicts the condemned individual and those closest to them.

And so that’s one way to deal with sickness:

October 10 is the World Day Against the Death Penalty, a day when people around the world speak out together to condemn this punishment for what it is – a brutal sanction that violates the right to life. More than half the world’s countries agree with them. But a minority of countries do not, going to great lengths to justify their continued use of it. Among the many justifications they use is that the death penalty deters drug trafficking.

But is the death penalty really the answer to drug crime – or any crime, in fact?

Drug offences can still get you the death penalty in over 30 countries.

If you’re convicted of a drug-related offence, you face the death penalty in more than 30 countries around the world. A drug offence can include anything from trafficking heroin to being caught carrying a small amount of marijuana. So far in 2015, China, Indonesia, Iran, Kuwait, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates and Viet Nam have all sentenced people to death for drug-related crimes. (source)

But again, eugenics for people born with DD-PD-ID or severe physical disabilities: Sterilization is one of the most frequently chosen forms of contraception in the world; many persons who do not want to have children select this simple, safe, and effective means of avoiding unwanted pregnancy. For individuals who are mentally disabled, however, sterilization has more ominous associations. Until recently, involuntary sterilization was used as a weapon of the state in the war against mental deficiency.
Under eugenic sterilization laws in effect in many states, retarded persons were routinely sterilized without their consent or knowledge. (old source)

Thirty three states had forced sterilization laws on the books.

Gov. John Kitzhaber formally apologized Monday for Oregon’s past eugenics law that led to the forced sterilization of hundreds of people.

Girls in reform school, people in mental institutions and poor women selected by welfare workers were among the more than 2,500 Oregonians subjected to sterilizations under a law that stood from 1917 to 1983.

“To those who suffered, I say the people of Oregon are sorry,” Kitzhaber said during a ceremony in the governor’s office. “Our hearts are heavy for the pain you endured.”

He is the second governor to atone for state eugenics laws after Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, who also erected a memorial in May to the first woman sterilized under the policy.

Among the dozens of people who crowded into Kitzhaber’s office for Monday’s ceremony was Velma Hayes, 68, who was sterilized at age 15 while living at the Fairview Training Center, a state-run institution for the mentally ill and retarded.

Hayes called the state’s acknowledgment of wrongdoing “long overdue,” but praised Kitzhaber’s effort to make things right. (source)

“I want to thank you for taking the time to apologize,” Hayes told the governor. “Your apology is appreciated and accepted.”

Not everyone was satisfied. Ken Newman, 61, who said he was given a vasectomy without his consent when he was a teen living at Fairview, said the governor’s remarks don’t erase what happened.

“I want more than an apology. I want to be compensated,” Newman said. The law was based on the pseudoscientific movement that sought to prevent people considered “unfit” or “defective” from having children. After 1967, the Oregon law was chiefly used to sterilize those with mental illness or mental disability.

But I started this short diatribe around visiting the Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland. Visiting my wife’s mom’s husband, her step-father. He’s 78, and he was diagnosed July 2022 with Glioblastoma Multiforme. It is a death sentence: Glioblastoma (GBM), also referred to as a grade IV astrocytoma, is a fast-growing and aggressive brain tumor. It invades the nearby brain tissue, but generally does not spread to distant organs. GBMs can arise in the brain de novo or evolve from lower-grade astrocytoma. (source)

Now, the fellow opted for brain surgery in July, but unfortunately, after radiation and chemotherapy, he couldn’t get off the toilet last week, and so they went in and gut into the brain. He has advance medical directives stating he wants all measures to deal with a fatal disease. He wants to be resusitated in the event of a heart stoppage.

Now, these are personal choices, and the intervention the second time only allowed the surgeons to get 70 percent of the cancer, as any futher in the 6 hours under the knife might get to that part of the brain that would leave him, well, in a coma or worse, virtually locked in a body that couldn’t do anything, including talk and move arms, what have you.

Until we have reached this level, in 1990: Remember those Death Panels?

Saying they can no longer afford the costly miracles of modern medicine, Oregon officials today announced the centerpiece of a plan to begin limiting medical services for people whose health care is paid for by the government.

After months of public debate over life-and-death questions, the Oregon Health Services Commission made public the main tool for their program: a list of 1,600 medical procedures, ranked by computer according to a formula that balances their costs against how many people would benefit.

Proponents describe the plan as a pioneering effort to balance limited government money against the potential for extensive high-cost, high-technology medical care. But critics say the state is entering the realm of judgments that are best left to patients and their doctors.

Oregon is poised to become the first state to make decisions on health care in a way that gives priority to preventive care. Such policies are already the practice in some countries, such as Britain, whose National Health Service sets up strict limits on patients’ access to specialists and sophisticated medical treatments.

Later this year, Oregon’s Legislature will decide where to draw a line across the computer list. Those ailments and injuries below the line will not be covered by the Medicaid program, which is jointly financed by the state and Federal governments. Conditions above the line will be fully covered.

The Oregon plan would not reduce coverage for the aged, disabled and the blind. All Medicaid coverage to those groups, no matter the procedure, would continue as before.

By eliminating a handful of expensive operations, Oregon officials say they may be able to nearly double the number of people receiving some coverage under Medicaid. About 130,000 Oregonians now receive some Medicaid care.

Oregon Draws Praise

”The miracle of medicine has outstripped our ability to pay for it,” said Richard Lamm, former Governor of Colorado and a longtime critic of current national medical payment practices. ”Somebody has to have the guts to say what policy brings the most good to the most people. Oregon is the first state to face up to it.”

About $600 bilion was spent from all sources on American health care last year.

Ranking near the top Oregon’s new list of ailments and injuries are such things as bacterial meningitis, bone cancer, multiple sclerosis and acute headaches.

But the list does not necessarily reflect the suffering that a particular disease can inflict on a human being. Thus, several other ailments – thumb sucking, for instance – are high on the list, not because they are the most painful or serious but because they are easily treated at a relatively low cost and affect a large number of people.

Among the diseases ranked near the middle are agoraphobia, cystic fibrosis and certain kinds of arthritis.

Near the bottom of the list, and likely to be dropped from Medicaid coverage, are treatments for chronic ulcers, sleep disorders, viral herpes, varicose veins impacted teeth and sex-change operations.

Detection and prevention of AIDS are high on the list, but treatment for advanced acquired immune deficiency syndrome, when a patient is close to death, is near the bottom.

How It Was Done

The list, which may still be changed later this year by a legislative committee, was drawn up computer. It is based on a ranking produced by a computer under a formula involving the cost of care based on the current Federal standard for the treatment in the Medicaid program, the length of time before the ailment would recur and the health of a patient’s after-treament – what Oregon officials called ”the quality of well-being.”

The list was put together by a panel of doctors, consumer advocates, health care administrators and medical-ethics experts. They were faced with such choices as whether a $100,000 organ transplant may be less valuable than regular tests for breast cancer.

Before Oregon can proceed with changes in its Medicaid coverage, the state must get a waiver from the Federal Government. Skepticism about the endeavor has already been expressed by one key member of Congress, Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who is chairman of the House subcommittee that governs Medicaid.

”If they can cover more people, I’m all for it,” said Mr. Waxman. ”But I don’t think we ought to fool ourselves into thinking there’s a lot of fat to cut from coverage of the most vulnerable people.”

Debate Dates to 1987

The Oregon Legislature’s health committee was ordered by the full Legislature to draw up the list after the state cut off Medicaid funds for organ transplants in 1987. At the time, state officials decided to concentrate their medical funds on such things as prenatal care.

The decision spurred a debate over where the state’s portion of Medicaid could best be spent.

”We think this will have a devastating impact on the poor in this state,” said Craig Irwin of Portland, whose mother, Kay Irwin, was denied Medicaid funds for a liver transplant two years ago. The operation was eventually done and paid for by a hospital in San Francisco.

”I don’t consider transplants wasteful,” said Mr. Irwin. ”They’re expensive, but they save lives.”

Public Sentiment Heard

The Oregon list reflects sentiment from more than 50 community meetings in the last year. In the hearings, prevention of illness and early detection were ranked much higher than operations that may prolong the lives of the gravely ill, according to a state study of the meetings.

”We picked up a very strong feeling from the general public that the American system pays too little attention to illness prevention,” said Dr. Michael Garland, a bio-ethicist who is president of a group that sampled opinion in the last year. ”The cost of health care is increasing at a rate that is unsustainable, and people want to put the brakes on somewhere.”

Some consumer groups, which were initially skeptical of the Oregon plan, have hailed the Oregon list.

”Nearly 60 percent of all medical procedures are unnecessary and inappropriate,” said Ellen Pinney, head of the Oregon Health Action Campaign, a consumer coalition. ”If this list draws us closer to identifying what those operations are, it’s a big boost.”

Proponents of the plan say the list, which ranks health care by priority, may eventually be used in all Medicaid programs.

”This is a strong dramatic step toward universal access of health care,” said Representative Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. ”I think this is going to be copied everywhere.” (NYT — May 3, 1990)

So, the priorities then are to feed the war machine, to feed the tax abatements and tax giveaways and outright subsidies for all the banks-chemical companies, you know, the MIC, military-chemical-pharma-ag-mining-oil-gas-education-media-prison-transportation-building-Chamber of Commerce COMPLEX.

That was thirty-three years ago, and I was a journalist, newspaperman, and we talked about that in Texas. And, we are no where close to any sanity now, any humanity now, anything of a cultured, smart and giving society, for-by-with-because-in the name of WE the people.

One disaster after another. One paycheck away from eviction and foreclosure and sacking. This is what has occurred on steroids, supercharged, since 1990: the eviceration of agency and humanity, until we have the dog-eat-dog world of rabid canines going after we the people. Fines, tolls, tickets, repossessions, fees, add-ons, taxes, excise, VAT, until we are truly paying just to breathe.

So, one man’s decision to live another month or two, well, it is selfish from many people’s points of view. Having a child or fostering many with develomental disabilities is selfish to many. The system that looks at homelessness, chronic addiction, all the crime, big and small, the offenders in the criminal injustice system, yep, many fascists want them taken out the Singapore way.

This mass psychosis and mass Stockholmd Syndrome and massive general anxiety disorder, and this collective amnesia and then now, actually hating 1.3 billion in China and hundreds of millions in Russia, Mexico, Iran, wherever, this is the script being played out . . . after centuries in this shit hole of land theft and seeding blankets with disease and hangings and forced internment and, well, you get the picture of a totally karmic dead culture.

Oh, priorities. Train derailments. Palestine, Ohio, and Dioxin poising. Love Canal, fenceline communities, cancer alleys, persistent organic compounds, volitle organic compounds, factory farms, feedlots from hell, poisons in our food, soil, air, water. All of the attacks on the fetus, the child, the sick and the weak.

This is the standard for a fascist society, where both red and blue, mean on the outside and mean on the inside, this duopoly, this sick schizophrenia — hating Russians and wanting to invade Mexico, all of it, this is a decayed and cancerous system, capitalism but also nuclear submarine/gunboat un-diplomacy.

This is the thuggery of Americanos, and forced sterilization, and forced pollution thrust onto poor communites, these sacrifice zones here and throughout the world, all part of the Dirty Capitalism of Fascism and Inverted Totalitarianism:

This research focused on the health status of fence-line communities defined as those adjacent to industrial facilities. Previous research has shown that the longer a population is exposed to high levels of pollution, the more deleterious its effect on the health of fence-line communities.  The populations in fence-line communities also typically consist of low-income minorities and present health disparities. Study findings were that fence-line communities demonstrated high rates of premature death, greater number of unhealthy mental days, and COVID-19 death rates. The differences in death rates for Blacks and Whites were staggering. The risk of COVID-19 death for Blacks in the 11-parish study area ranged from 1.5 times to 11.4% higher than Whites. Fence-line communities are an example of environmental injustice and the effects of slow violence from air pollution. (source)

So many countries are America’s fenceline sacrifice zones. (source)

This is just in one state, so multiple it for all states, and then countries:

There are 10 million people in North Carolina, and 9 million hogs. Judging by the smell, the hogs are winning. Or, rather, the giant corporate factory hog farms are. Hogs are the largest agricultural product of the Tarheel State, adding at least $2 billion to the economy there. How the hogs are raised and slaughtered, and how the waste is handled, is making life miserable for many North Carolinians. Billions of gallons of pig feces and urine are collected in lagoons, mixed with blood and rotting pig body parts. To keep these fetid ponds from overflowing, the toxic liquid is pumped skyward with enormous spray devices, aerosolizing the waste, which is carried away by the wind. Neighbors suffer indescribably bad odor and an array of illnesses. The notoriously regressive Republican majority in the North Carolina statehouse has passed a bill—H.B. 467, Agriculture and Forestry Nuisance Remedies—to protect the factory hog farming industry from liability, which the state’s recently elected Democratic governor has yet to sign—or veto. In the meantime, impacted communities, mostly African-American, are fighting back.

Choices? This is the reality of Capitalism — no parent wants plastic in their child’s feces or pig feces in atomized form in their lungs. There are no choices in this economic and commercial fascism.

How much more medical intervention can a 78-year-old afford? And this father in law is religious, so I am not sure why he’s not opting out for a decent cocktail of drugs and pain killers to ease him into the passing?

High level thinking means we have to look at the causes and the effects, the origins of decisions and medical therapies, and the psychology of individuals and the collective. We have to understand what was the option before these medical interventions. The toll on families, loved ones, society. We do not have these higher level thinkers in K12, and we discourage that higher order of thinking, and that solutions gathering discourse, and open dialogue and deep learning and advanced critical thinking and critical feeling: pushing our brains to other higher order levels of thinking—helping us move beyond remembering and recalling information and move deeper into application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and creation.

I can put myself into this father-in-law’s shoes, but I do not think he has even after 78 years on the planet, the ability to do that deep dialogue with us, his surgeons and with himself.

I taught for more than 40 years variations on the theme: Higher order thinking, or “HOT” for short, takes thinking to higher levels than restating the facts. HOT requires that we do something with the facts. We must understand them, infer from them, connect them to other facts and concepts, categorize them, manipulate them, put them together in new or novel ways, and apply them as we seek new solutions to new problems. Following are some ways to access higher order thinking.

Yet, oh yet, here we are, and the society is in decay, and a few beautiful people and elites rule the 80 percenters, us, even those of us with a higher level of thinking about now, context, competing and contradictory concepts, about history, about systems, and systems thinking and about baselines and shifting baselines.

Are we sort of in this consumerist and retail and consumption-based society in a classic vegetative state? Emotionally arrested? Stunted? Raw and fight-flight-freeze cultivated?

Oh, goddamn, you know my answer if you have read my “stuff” over time, over the years. And where is the best place for lawyers and billionaires and hedge funders and Wall Streeters and Lords of War, and how many circles of hell are there now for today’s new breed of Machiavelli and Eichmann and Edward Bernays and Ayn Rand?

A good start, indeed!!

Inflammed, man: Raj Patel and Rupa Marya, the authors of ‘Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice’, on building an economy focused on care

Rupa: The colonial project was really enacted through the missionaries, the medics and the militaries – medicine played a role in asserting the dominance of colonial forces in other people’s territories.

It was not interested in keeping all the native people healthy and optimizing their wellness. It was interested in keeping the colonizers healthy, so that they could continue to extract the wealth and dominate those people in their lands. When you really understand that, you’re not surprised when you see that Black women have a 12 times mortality rate than white women in the postpartum period in New York City. You understand that, okay these are remnants of thoughts and understandings that have really shaped the structures of modern medicine today – part of the violences are embedded into the frameworks and the institutions and the way that the culture recreates itself.

When we think about words, like the ‘non compliant patient’, doctors interrupt their patients within 11 seconds on average of encountering them. We don’t tend to think: is our patient the expert in their body through their lived experience in their own body with their disease? Doctors who focus on narrative medicine in history taking, can most of the time find out what’s wrong with somebody within 95% of the time by just really listening and asking the right questions and listening to how a person reveals the story of their illness. And then asking some more questions about what’s going on around the body. What are the sum of the exposures from that person? What are their histories, their ancestries? What kind of traumas are they carrying through generations? How is that impacting the cellular function of the immune system?

So all these things are much more intricately tied to the web of life around them. As a practicing doctor, we were used to thinking of the immune system as something that fights off invaders – again, like a very colonial us versus them dichotomy, this Cartesian Dualism that is really a part of our understanding whether it’s in medicine, or how we address ecology right now. These enlightenment era fallacies continue to pervert the way we’re able to understand what we’re seeing in front of us. So those ways of seeing were how I learned about the immune system. But as we studied and read for our book, I started to understand that the immune system is actually our harmonizer with the world around us. So if the world around us is toxic and damaging, the immune system responds with damage, and trying to remediate that damage, sets off its own cycles of more damage inside the body which is registered as chronic sterile inflammation.

But if the world around us is in balance – ecologically, socially, politically – then the immune system harmonizes with balance. So to just focus on each individual and say, Oh, you just need juice and this probiotic pill and get some more exercise and sleep better – misses the whole point, because you can’t actually get better health outcomes until you start working on the level of restructuring the world around our bodies. And that is not something any individual can do. That is something we must do collectively, and is happening right now collectively, and those are the stories that we have lifted in the book.

   

Every war is a war against children.

–Egalntyne Jebb, founder Save the Children a century ago.

                                           

We can celebrate and ruminate on any day of any month, and April is one of those months that have milestones and remembrances vital to me, and important to tens of millions.

I’ve written about National Poetry Month before for the New Times. This celebration of poetry was introduced in 1996 and organized by the Academy of American Poets as a way to increase awareness and appreciation of poetry in the United States.

For me, way before this recognition, I was deeply steeped into poetry – creative writing, too. A poet is a creative, a writer, and that person is more than someone like Pablo Neruda, Chile’s famous poet. For my own tutelage, poetry also means advocating revolution.

I was in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and I certainly embraced this revolution against the thug dictator. Some call this Sandinista rebellion as a revolution of poets: Ernesto Cardenal, Mejía Godoy, Sergio Ramírez, Gioconda Belli, and Rosario Murillo, currently the Vice President and First Lady of the country.

Someone who is almost my contemporary, Omar Cabezas Lacayo (born 1950 in León, Nicaragua), is a Nicaraguan author, revolutionary and politician. He was a commander in the guerrilla war against Anastasio Somoza and prominent Sandinista party member. His personal account of his time as a guerrilla fighting the dictatorship, published in Nicaragua, is entitled, “Fire From the Mountain.” I heard him read in Managua almost 40 years ago.

However, my introduction to poetry came from one side of my family, Scots, a grandmother, aunts and uncles living Ayr, the home of Robert Burns (1759-1796), Scotland’s national poet. I was 18 months of age with my family in Ayr absorbing recitations of Burns.

Burns came from a working family, unlike most of Britain’s men of letters. “Tam O’ Shanter” is Burns’ poetic masterpiece. The climax is a witches’ Sabbath, attended by all kinds of gruesome sights. And pride of place in this hellish scene is given to lawyers and priests:

“Three Lawyers’ tongues, turned inside out,

Wi’ lies seamed like a beggar’s clout;

Three Priests’ hearts, rotten, black as muck,

Lay stinking, vile, in every neuk.”

Many wonder how Burns’ poetry ever succeeded since he had no formal training; he managed to produce the finest lyrical poetry that ever emerged from these Isles. Burns’ lyricism is written, not in English, but in his own tongue, the dialect of the Scottish Lowlands. His song is as natural as the woodlark’s.

So many great writers have entered my mind, heart and imagination. I was a freshman at the University of Arizona (1975) in poet Richard Shelton’s class whereupon he recruited some of us to head up to the Arizona State Penitentiary for writer’s workshops he facilitated, with convicts behind bars. His book, “Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer” (2007), is more about Shelton’s professional fulfillment and a testament to the transformative power of writing for him, as well as the prisoners.

I hearken back to Walt Whitman (1819-1892), our own American poet (essayist and journalist, too). He was a humanist, and he worked as a stretcher bearer in the American Civil War. He embraced the power of transition — between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. For many, he is the father of free verse. Whitman on being a poet:

This is what you should do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others,     hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men … re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.

April 22 is traditionally tied to Earth Day, which I have been a large part of as organizer in several locales, including Spokane. This celebration of our web of life started in 1970 with the amazing book by Rachel Carson, “Silent Spring,” as the bible of environmentalism.

But then, April 30 also is another date, the starting date of the Fall of Saigon (1975) with the defeat of American forces in Vietnam. I was there in 1994 and 1996, and in 1995 I organized a 20^th Anniversary look back on “Vietnam” where I put literary, visual, cinematic and theater arts front and center for this month-long event sponsored by dozens of groups, including my two schools – UT-El Paso and El Paso Community College.

The poets looking at war, the Vietnamese, the trauma and the country stirred me to action.

While I never met Carson or Whitman, I did spend time with Denis Levertov, who was an ardent supporter of poetry of protest. With Muriel Rukeyser and several other poets, Levertov founded the Writers and Artists Protest against the War in Vietnam. She took part in several anti-war demonstrations in Berkeley, California. In the ensuing decades she spoke out against nuclear weaponry, American aid to El Salvador, and the Persian Gulf War.

I go to a Vietnamese poet, Thanh Thao, from his poem, “A Soldier Speaks of His Generation” (1973) as a capstone of this opinion piece with my drumbeat concussing why poetry is so important:

They are so very young

as they flicker along on the stream

into a faraway meadow

on an endless evening.

They’re the people who came first

twenty years ago as one generation

and also the ones who will come later,

twenty years from today.

That evening

on the small canal

artillery attacks and flowing water.

How clearly you can see

 the faces of

our generation!

+–+

Existential Crisis

I’ve been closely tied to poets — the term also hits close to home, as in writers in general — and the potential for change through language. Today, so-called poets wrie insipid junk about Zelensky, about a new Churchill or David! Here, one piece on Bly:

Bly’s Call to Duty

By Paul K. Haeder

Each of his poems puts a chink in the armor of the war makers. Robert Bly’s Friday night appearance at SFCC will be part touchstone for peace and part riling-up of the audience to bear witness and take action.

Bly, a preeminent American poet whose 80-year-old voice and intellect have helped to sculpt an important vision of literary art and cultural reclamation, will speak as part of Spokane Falls Community College’s “Lit Live!”

While Bly is a sought-after voice of reason and lyrical charm, his poetic pulse has been stimulated by a life alone, working far from the rarified atmosphere of college or university settings. His roots are in Mansfield, Minn., and in the furrows of hard-working immigrants where his reverence for land and people germinated.

Translator of such great poets as South America’s Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo and Antonio Machado, India’s Ghalib, Spain’s Lorca and Jim & eacute;nez, and Norway’s Rolf Jacobsen and Olav H. Hauge, Bly’s output of articles, essays and criticism is matched by his more than 40 books of poetry.

Enwrapped in solitude, Bly spins ruminations shaped by other cultures, other poets — as in “Meeting the Man Who Warns Me”:

I dream that I cannot see half of my life. “I look back, it is like the blind spot in a car./ So much just beyond the reach of our eyes, what tramples the grasses while the horses are asleep, the hoof marks all around the cave mouth…/ what slips in under the door at night, and lies exhausted on the floor in the morning.

Also slated for the Music Auditorium stage on Friday night are four male drummers, pounding animal skins as a tribute to “the wild man” in Bly’s Iron John. His 1991 book examines the dichotomy between Savage Man, who is both wounded and inflicts wounds on earth and humankind, and Wild Man, the shaman-healer, Zen priest or woodsman. In Iron John, we have a book about men and the lost energy of visions, fairy tales and the male drumbeat of power and depth. It’s a book of healing and reaffirmation of soul.

Bly also helped redirect the creative surge of Modernism’s influence on poetry by unraveling his words and lines into what Victoria Frenkel Harris has called “incorporative consciousness.” Bly believes that the poet or creative thinker must go “much deeper than the ego … at the same time [becoming] aware of many other beings.” In a sense, he believes that “leaping out” of the intellectual world and into what we intuitively hold as our own realities best explores the paradoxes of two worlds: the world of our psychic pain, and the world in which we must adjust to observing the rules.

Bly came to prominence during the Vietnam War era — a time that tore at the psychic integration of American culture. He recalls how controversial his work was then: “Most of the English teachers in the universities hated our doing ‘political poems,’ as they were called. That still happens,” he recently said about those heady days of the ’60s. “When I’m at a reception at a university these days, an English professor may come up to me and ask: ‘How do you feel now about those poems you wrote during the war?’ They want me to disown the poems. I say, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t write more of them.'”

Bly, along with David Ray, created the group American Writers Against the Vietnam War. The first important protest volume was A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (1966), edited by Bly and Ray.

In one of his poetry collections, The Light Around the Body, Bly cast a beacon of hazy light upon the symbiotic relationship of poverty and racism and the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

But now, in 2006, with the stink of Abu Ghraib and Falluja still enveloping Mr. Bush’s war, Bly speaks with singular impetus in his recent work, The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War. “The invasion of Iraq is the biggest mistake any American administration has ever made,” he says. “The most dangerous and greatest confrontation is between twentieth-century capitalist fundamentalism and eleventh-century Muslim fundamentalism,” he writes.

For aficionados of the poetic form, The Insanity of Empire embodies both Bly’s disdain for immoral governments and Bly as an the artful practitioner of the ghazal, an Arab poetic form:

I don’t want to frighten you, but not a stitch can be taken/ On your quilt unless you study. The geese will tell you/ A lot of crying goes on before the dawn comes.

SFCC’s literary publication, Wire Harp, and the endowment for Lit Live! will not be the only beneficiaries of Bly’s incantations on Friday night (50 percent of the gate goes to the endowment). Conscious Living — a local business that creates events including the annual Celebrating Body, Mind and Spirit Expo and A Psychic Affair — is partnering with SFCC.

As a reminder of Bly’s continuing relevance, consider that he’s an anti-war activist of long standing. In the Dec. 9, 2002 issue of The Nation, Bly was one of the first to beat the earth drum against the impending war, in his poem, “Call and Answer”:

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days/ And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed & r & The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?/ I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense/ Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out! See who will answer!”

+–+

But in 2023, the rot has flooded almost all people in the Western world. Censorship, the New Blue McCarthyism, and unimagineable crimes supported. This existential crisis for me is around cohorts who call themselves “poets” but who are navel gazers, looking at their folds of skin over time and waxing about getting old. Fine, that perspective, for sure, but in the past 40 years, and now, breakneck speed since the Planned Pandemic, and now, the Proxy War, and the Trump Years, and the Russia Ain’t at the Gate madness, my so-called fellow writers have fallen flat.

They do not look at the depth of how messed up the world is — poverty, land theft, murder incorporated in all parts of the world, those 800-plus US military bases, the ungodly hundreds of trillion$ dollars thrown at war lords, war dogs — but instead go into themselves, look at the raven in the sky and the time ticking off around their sagging eyes.

Political poetry? Great dervishes of pain calling out the entire cabal of capitalist killers.

Vietnam conflict remembered around Spokane

• Janelle Atyeo/ Oct 22, 2003

Two dozen of Paul Haeder´s Vietnam photos are on display at the Community Building.

Paul Haeder traveled to Vietnam in 1994, taking about 6,000 photographs.

This week has been a time for reflection and discussion of our country’s involvement in Vietnam. The collective event called Vietnam War Remembered consisted of literary readings, films, panel discussions and a photography display.

“It’s a tribute to the people that fought and the fact that our country seems even today to be healing,” said Paul Haeder of the Gonzaga English Department, organizer of the event. “I think it strikes some raw nerves in people.”

Haeder was 18 years old by the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, but he felt the impact in many ways. “I was an Army brat,” he said of his experience during his father’s 32 years of service in the military.

During the 15-year war he even saw some of his older friends drafted.

“A lot of my friends have been messed up by that war,” Haeder said. “They’ve never been able to climb out of that foxhole.”

After the war, many soldiers fell into substance abuse, found themselves homeless, or developed post-traumatic stress disorder.

The country as a whole was troubled. Often soldiers did not receive a warm welcome home. Opposition to the war was strong. As the first televised war, the ravages of Vietnam were brought straight into American homes.

Rusty Nelson, president of Spokane Veterans for Peace, thinks the war was wrong. “I am amazed that people still try to glorify what the United States did in Vietnam or that they would honor me because I fought there,” he wrote in an e-mail. “My perspective is that I was given medals and recognition for the ugliest things I ever did.”

It was because of some of the ugliness they saw in Vietnam that some Americans were apprehensive about the recent war in Iraq. Many protesters adopted the slogan, “We don’t want another Vietnam.”

“[The Vietnam War] was an extravagant investment of money and human life to make Southeast Asia safe for United States corporations to exploit natural and human resources,” says Nelson.

The war brought into question the issues of chemical and biological warfare and the rapidly evolving technology. In 1994 Haeder traveled to Vietnam to perform biodiversity studies with the World Wildlife Fund. When the studies were complete, Haeder traveled the country from border to border, taking about 6,000 photographs, two dozen of which were displayed for this week’s event. The photos will remain on display at the Community Building, 35 W. Main, for three weeks.

His color photographs capture the spirit of villagers old and young.

“They had so much respect for America and for me,” expressed Haeder. They wanted to know what America thinks, he said. In other photos street scenes, rice fields and forested landscapes put a person in the heart of Vietnam.

Shots such as those of a bright orange butterfly or a vibrant green snake show some of the country’s wildlife while a photo of Vietnamese soldiers resting before a monument to Ho Chi Minh is a more direct response to the war.

Upon returning to El Paso in 1995, where Haeder taught at a university, he organized a similar event reflecting on Vietnam. The larger-scale event was even commended by The New York Times.

This first-time event in Spokane started Oct. 20 with a showing of the Oliver Stone film “Heaven and Earth,” which follows a Vietnamese woman as she grows up in Vietnam, experiences war as a teenager and marries an American soldier.

Tuesday, a literary reading featured veterans Dan Webster of The Spokesman-Review and Michael Holmes and poetry reading by English professors Tod Marshall from Gonzaga, and Connie Wasem, from Spokane Falls Community College, as well as Haeder.

+–+

Slaying Dragons, Slaying Demons

Resistance in the Womb – Vietnam Is in My DNA

Vietnam like a leech inside my guts, slowly growing, waiting to expurgate right before truth hits my amydgala like a hollow-point uranium-tipped US of A projectile.

Di di Mao I & Ra khỏi đây II

Di di Mao – young guy named Hal with M-16

Di di mao
Get out of here,
boy, emaciated like a
walking zither, legs
shanked by B-52 metal
chopsticks for arms
Di di mao now, boy,
so I get some madam boom-boom

Di di mao
Go on, get out of here,
leave me in my bivouac
tethered to M-16
and howling Credence Clearwater
Budweiser and Castle Rock
cheeseburgers

Di di mao
Black-toothed auntie
your sack of bones
weighted by bamboo shoots
eyes rimmed by leeches
you hiss when I drive by
you twist up like roots — red
exclamation point for tongue

Di di mao
frozen refrain
each zip from my bloated cheeks
zip-zip-zip from Mattel’s
automatic carbine
white horizon courtesy of DuPont
dioxin defoliant
orange noon thanks to DOW
napalm, white phosphorus, caldrons
percolating into my bone

Di di mao
get out of here now,
Charlie, bequest your sisters
and wives, we are
masters of the flesh
sweaty carcasses
lurching for our all-American
pursuit of happiness

Di di moi
swollen delta
where water buffalo
undulate in their gases,
heat from
F-4 Phantoms —
with jaws of a great
white
shark — rattle
elephant tusks.

*–* *–*

Ra khỏi đây – Boy with Dog in Rice Basket

my rainforest is purity
horn bills sail through mists
where my elders follow our joss
stick incense trails
vines like tendrils
to heaven,
the slog and muck and verdant
forest sings songs
of genuflections
to dead brothers and mothers

ra khỏi đây, get out of here now
pulpy-flesh mastodons
go back to your refrigerators
T-bones and French fries
find your leaders
placate your lip-less gray kings
who are mean with their green wads
go, find them and ask
why you are running
into our shadows

ra khỏi đây
recede into your choppers
smoky trails lead back to your
land of garish light
your churning chugging citizens
purge from your jet planes
like sunburned bovine —
leave me to my lotus
blossom,
my empty stomach
my sister who is like
an apostrophe
agile, sudden
fragile, but with a bomb

ra khỏi đây
get out of my
Hue, where my monks
self-immolate on the banks of the Perfume
River, butterflies
flutter into memory — watch
my grandmothers throw your
C-rations into the river
your photographs of lip-cinched
sallow men
fleshy children
balloon pin-up girls
float in a river
of fire

ra khỏi đây
we are pleasant in our
stone age — our
mosquitoes like black lace
wet-skinned tigers
lurch after barking deer
vine snakes like liquid titanium
civets watch kingfishers
who spear frogs
like my Viet Cong
sending pongee stakes
wet into your
hearts . . . .

ra khỏi đây . . . di di mao.

Pretty simple stuff, even for a 66-year-old, 2/6/57, struggling, for fucking sure, in this punishment society, a culture pushing as many of its elderly and youth into the proverbial debtor’s gutter. It doesn’t matter to the controllers – teen, happy-go-lucky newly wed couple, 50-something, pensioner, kicked to the street, to the endless line of scraps, prayers to the money god, to the devils who evict, shut off gas-water-electric, to the white smocks and their big pharma and med industrial seven chambers of hell complex. Maybe the tipping point sliding beyond the beyond happened the moment we blew away any sanity and began playing the domino game about Vietnam. One tile falls, and the rest go, what, socialist, communist, antithetical to the corruption of capitalism, each tile falling, going, gone?

Vietnam like a leech inside my guts, slowly growing, waiting to expurgate right before truth hits my amydgala like a hollow-point uranium-tipped US of A projectile.

Emiliano Zapata, more than some cut-out historical lie created by the controllers, the historians, the directors and producers.

I quote:

I want to die a slave to principles. Not to men.
If there is not justice for the people, let there be no peace for the government.
It’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

Vietnam like a leech inside my guts, slowly growing, waiting to expurgate right before truth hits my amydgala like a hollow-point uranium-tipped US of A projectile.

There is no calm in America, this bloody July 4th, the gusto of a flagging, intellectually flaccid nation of killers, toned and full of IT hipster cool, those engineers and technocrats surfing in the California dream as they build the silicon master parts and the electronic nets that are the killing instruments of capitalism.

They await another bit of hubris and flatulence from the Spielberg and Bruckheimer types to the 10th power, blockbuster pathos a la propaganda, maybe coming soon from one of those chosen few studios to screen in one of the chosen few’s theaters: Lies about Vietnam, about Panama, Malvinas, Fallujah. The drama of our times is death and lies and unfathonable cunning. I remember all the hype about the foolish film, Saving Private Ryan, while one of my favorite directors, Terrence Malick, came out with his great anti-war film, The Thin Red Line – almost 20 years ago.

It’s the Vietnam of Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, Heaven and Earth. Imagine the books, Paradise of the Blind, The Sorrow of War, Scent of Green Papaya. Gut, really, this country is perverted, war and poisons, in the air and over the air, a pandemic of the consumer lie, infecting ever corner of the world. War criminals Bush-Clinton-Mrs. Clinton-Obama-All-Those-Israel Firsters. Think about Blair, pestilence that is allowed to breathe the same air as human beings.

Vietnam, the plague of the white Christian-Hebrew race, machinations, psy-ops, billions traded for gluttony and pleasure with arms and armaments.

Not another Vietnam . . . Not Another Vietnam on this Empire’s watch. Words uttered by Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush A & B, Clinton, Obama, the rest of the universal replaceable parts to their controllers’ wars, skirmishes, dirty wars, battles, civil actions, coup d’etats, invasions, shock and awe’s.

Military glory–that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood–that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy…

~Abraham Lincoln

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

~Albert Camus

There are war criminals in colleges, as CEOs, in judicial positions, floating in their ether as media moguls; the entire system of capitalism is hinged on death and subjugation. There are criminals with more blood on their hands than the paid killers they sometimes call “warriors” they send to commit murder, and they look like Obama, like Kissinger, like Mrs. Clinton, like Bill Clinton, faces interchangeable, white/black/brown, Albright/ Rice/Gonzales, all of them, even the limp heads of Trump University or U of Phoenix. War criminals heading up the IT departments at any number of armament death companies. PhDs, engineers, software designers, all of them, holding onto the power of their wages, the vacations and bonuses, their children going to summer cello camp and soccer training retreats. Skiing and boating and slum tours and snorkeling with manatees and zip-lining in the Amazon. War criminals who never laced up a boot or hump a rucksack or touched an M-60 or grenade launcher. MBAs, JDs, software architects, doctorates in engineering . . . . War criminals, genuflecting at Easter, fasting at Lent and Rosh HaShanah . . . .

A thousand subsidiaries of the tooling companies – Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Honeywell, HP, United Technologies, Bechtel, and on and on and on. The deliverers of death, of PTSD, permanent homelessness, continual war-war, depleted uranium, festering water systems, hospitals that have no air conditioning, lights, and life saving medicines, dumped into oceans. The DNA of America goes back to killing indigenous, killing with fire, muskets, smallpox, barbed wire, booze and shaved heads.

Imagine, the triple chins on Kissinger, Mrs. Clinton, Trump, their bad seed children giving birth to future bad seeds, all swaddled in the investor-renter-casino capitalism class that is responsible for more death and mayhem and global warming, global pestilence, global extinction than any and all the despots and warlords and sociopaths that have ruled their gold, their people, the people’s land, combined.

I am talking about PTSD with these rockets blaring, neighborhoods like war zones, friends who end up in corners, in closets, outside, shaking the death ghosts of Indochina like spiders in their heads, that delerium tremens of all wars, perpetrated by the Ivy League, Finishing School, MBA, Lobby Classless, leaches and ticks all of them, the black plague of debt like pandemics of dengue eating at the souls and future souls of the majority, us.

This war, Vietnam, or what the people of that country call, America’s War with Vietnam, defined me, since day one, really, 1957 the year of the rooster, my birth, or before, 1954, Battle of Dien Bien Phu, Ho Chi Minh ready for elections, Emperor Boa Dai assassinated by Ngo Dinh Diem who refused elections.

My old man was already working the intelligence sector of the first phase of the Vietnam War, 1959-’63. His boss, Dwight D. Eisenhower, stated, in 1954, “Nobody is more opposed to intervention than I am.” The white men are the liars, the false flag designers, plagues upon the war booty, victims, families on all sides, infinite and inter-generational PTSD. They are glib, get to triple-dip, retire with golf carts and skin cancers removed and quadruple by-passes after the Seven-and-Sevens are splashed on the ice of their veins.

We of course supplied bombs, munitions, bombers and pilots flying sorties over Vietnam for the French, advisers, bankers, funny-looking economic hit men, and my old man, before I screeched into the world, was working first with the Air Force on the cryptographic clandestine stuff for the US, and then later when he became an office in the US Army.

I remember as a three- and four-year-old kid listening to war stories from my family’s friends, special operations forces in both the Air Force and Army talking about the things they were doing in Vietnam . . . Thailand . . . Cambodia.

Bombs bursting in air, those Gatling guns, immense firepower, tsunamis of napalm, the entire shit show that is American and Western warfare. Of course, years later, as a journalism student, the first causality of war (now all warfare – cultural, racial, economic, environmental, educational, judicial) was and will always be Truth, as US Senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917 – “The first Casualty when war comes, is truth.” Taken to its journalistic elegance, Philip Knightley 60 years later published a book, “The First Casualty from the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker. All expropriated from greater minds, someone like Aeschylus (In war, the first casualty is truth!)

So Ali is dead, the history, the revolt, the raw revolutionary force of Muhammad, the fabric of civil rights, Malcolm X, King, Black Panthers, dead; some semblance of anti-authoritarianism, something way beyond the here and now of US Patriot Act, Total Surveillance, the Zuckerberg-Google-Giving-It-All-To-The-Corporate-Man, gone.

Indochina, the lies, the cover-ups of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford. The colonels and majors turned generals and thieves – Powell, Haig, Westmoreland, so many jumping, those interchangeable parts – wars in Central America, South America, Chile, entire continents, Africa. The gluttony of feeding frenzies for more and more money stuffed into all their orifices. . . . Then, five decades later, this pathetic thing called Obama. The scrubbing of history by the controllers. The project to disinfect America’s war with Vietnam, the eco-cide, the biological warfare, the assassinations, the napalm mornings, the entire shit storm that represents US of Armaments, the entire industries of death created by the Controllers, Financiers, in Iraq, overkill in Panama, anywhere that is not moved by USA shit culture or economic structural suicide, mowed down labor organizers, priests, students, nuns, teachers, clerics, environmentalists, grandparents search for the ghosts of children.

Mowed down by money. America’s claim to fame. A Trump of mafia casino fame, the Boss, fire for fun, or Clinton, secreted away to Goldman Sach’s alimentary canal for a million buck for the shit coming from her mouth. War Criminals, The Mrs. and the Donald Toupee . . . .

KATM . . . KATR . . . The alphabet soup of Murder, Inc. Kill Anything That Moves . . . Kill All That Resist . . . .

Any activist or resister or revolutionary could live and die by the boxer’s words, Ali:

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?

 No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would put my prestige in jeopardy and could cause me to lose millions of dollars which should accrue to me as the champion.

But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is right here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…

If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail. We’ve been in jail for four hundred years.”

But that is not how America flies now, as the scrubbing of all truth about the illegal invasions and the mass murdering of Vietnamese by America come to light. A celebration to last 13 years, this “thank you” to the veterans of the war on Vietnam by Americans is preposterous and asinine and Orwellian, all in one heavy lying breath to mark 50 Fucking Years of Illegal and Wonton Murder in Indochina. More than 10,000 companies (corporations, mostly) have put money into this project approved by Congress in 2012. It’s a pack of lies, a scrubbing of the real events and history of that criminal enterprise called America – from the “Celebration’s” Propaganda website: “to pay tribute to the contributions made on the home front” and “to highlight the advances in technology, science, and medicine related to military research conducted during the Vietnam War.” Wow, sick Little Eichmann’s and Josef Mengele’s, America is with all it’s Zio-Con and Puritan engines of profit firing on all 12 cylinders. You will not see a word on that Pentagon and Congressional tribute site any mention of the millions upon millions of peace activists and radical patriots fighting the scourge of the entire mess that was the corporate war we launched against Vietnam.

Sanitizing Malcom, MLK, Jr., Anything that attempts to move the people away from the lie factories that are part and parcel Occupation Corporate America. Billions made from that “war,” from the splat of children, the cancers of uterine hells, plowed-over towns, sprayed-upon vast millions of acres of land, the B-52s dropping bombs in veronicas of hate and precision onto orphanages, farmers, cities. The old starved of humanity from the invaders, and the families that lost loved ones. While Yankee Go Home drank, smoked, fornicated, murdered, shot-up with heroin, filled bellies with the calories of home airlifted to the jungle, and they laughed at the wounded, tortured, dredged the sky of heaven and torched Buddha and shrines and elephants, just for fucking fun, a Senator McCain said a thousand times as he belched on top of his prostitutes, young women sold into the covenant of capitalism USA style.

You are not supposed to write like this about this stuff, now, in 2016, words pressed so no blood is left, but just an empty string of marketing buzz words . . . . American killing Tuesdays and full of glee about all that collateral damage, a thing of necessity, but, heck, sorry, but what were those kids doing at that wedding party anyways?

The touchstone for me, 59 years and counting down, is a war, youth, that fanciful time, the moment when realization peaks, and the boy is not longer charmed by stories of great feats, stories of bombs bursting in air. The DNA code in me was to resist, revolt, oppose, and if I was now living today as a 10 year old, the diagnosis would be pure and swift delivered by the Mengele’s of Psychiatry and Perverted Medicine, those elites doling out prescriptions on how to cull defiance, strip discord, and all of it meted out by the compliant teachers and lovers of social engineering, mostly women now – in the education class, the social work class, those politically correct punishers who shop at Costco and paste on pastel highlights onto their ever-bloating faces.

The education class, now toeing the line and marching to the orders of the elite, a very small minority stuck in tribal and religious politics entwined with Capitalism with a big C. I understand the bending fabric of this country, my own brethren when I started teaching in 1983. This is not a country of Oaxacan resisters, Mexican teachers, who take it upon themselves to be the true voices of social justice not only for their children and students, but communities.

As I filed this installment of my anti-memoir, struggle, resistance, murder and resolve are taking place, the stage being rampant, rapacious capitalism USA style. Here, read where my heart is always:

Members of Coördinadora Nacional de Trajabadores de Educación (National Coördination of Education Workers, or CNTE), the largest teacher’s union in the country, went on strike to protest education reform passed by the current administration. Those reforms would — among other things — require teachers to take standardized tests to evaluate their qualifications.

 Reforms would also end “normal” schools, government-funded teacher training schools that serve in rural and impoverished (and heavily indigenous) parts of Mexico, and which provide alternate paths to those who might otherwise grow up working in the fields. Normales have been around for a century, and historically are places people go to learn not just how to be teachers, but how to protest and challenge the government.

(The case of Ayotzinapa— the 43 teacher trainees who went missing in September 2014— involved “normalistas,”or students from a normal school in Mexico’s Guerrero state.)

The Mexican government has responded to the protests by first taking professors into custody, and then, on 19 June 2016, firing bullets and tear gas into a crowd in the Oaxacan town of Nochixtlán: “They were shooting at us as if we were animals”, William Velázquez, a 34-year old teacher, told FNL. He picked up a large stick. “These are the only weapons we have. We don’t carry guns. They were firing on unarmed civilians.”

There is no other way to put this – our country is a wasteland, vast and empty, a bubbling up Coke can in the hands of every man, woman and child, holding the stuffy toys of Disney and Speilberg, all the lies set up early on with the infantilization of adults as they trip along with children watching the most insipid stuff the masters and controllers spew out.

One world, one Disney-20th Century Fox-Netflix-Facebook package of lies, from cradle to grave. Imagine teachers in this country with any backbone stiffer than a squid’s fighting reforms of standardization, washing away teacher agency, generating one giant superficial triangulating set of lies produced by Pearson Publishing, LLC and the other one or two conduits of pacification and agnotology.

I found the same sort of resistance to my own resistance to the official narrative or history of this country, of the Vietnam war, to Ali, to anything remarkable about revolution and radical left thought in all the schools I was taught.

Today, the world is one compliant factory, a big tattletale world, mostly directed by women at lower echelons, driving the fight and resistance out of young people, young boys of color, anybody that might cross their narrative of following the rules and coloring in the lines.

My defining moment as a kid, since my old man was a professional soldier, as he called himself – 10 years in the Air Force and another 22 in the Army, coming out as a CW4, wounded twice in Vietnam, his own crytpography career tied to his intelligence, seeking a bachelor’s and accomplishing it when I was 10, in Heidelberg, and then a couple of masters degrees in many locales throughout his career, culminating at the University of Arizona. He was a history buff, and I fought him on the Vietnam War, fought the entire project of militarism and what it was like to be a military dependent living on posts and bases.

It’s a fifty-none year struggle, but there was an awakening, 22 and 20 years ago, when I floated into the gossamer of Vietnam, right when that first Clinton “normalized” relations with the USA, after 20 years after the Fall of Saigon. Here’s that story, a chink in the armor that is the plague of propaganda!

WAR AND PEACE IN VIETNAM

Flying into Vietnam 10 years ago brought back the phone call my family received that my father had been shot by the Viet Cong. That was 1969, and I was a 13-year-old fighting schoolmates because I didn’t support the war in Indochina.

Even before the cold announcement that my father had been severely wounded carrying cryptographic equipment in a Huey, I knew the United States was wrong to be in Vietnam. Something about the mythology of war, invisible dominoes, never repeating history.

Now, flying over the mossy forest, a patchwork of clouds, and the glimmer from hundreds of flooded fields and winding rivers, I felt like I was about to drop into a dream.

The stiff green uniforms and yellow star on red background of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam suited the hard-faced immigration soldiers at Hanoi’s airport. There was panic in the air from mostly Vietnamese workers and businessmen deplaning from Moscow. Our group was scatterbrained from the long flights from London to Moscow to Pakistan to Hanoi. We were researchers being treated like tourists, our gear dragged by young blokes looking for hotel commissions.

Most of the Vietnamese on the streets hustling us for cyclo rides (three-wheeled pedaled push carts) and hawking imitation Swiss army knives, Rolex watches, Zippo lighters and U.S. dog tags were young men. This was a testament to one of the world’s highest population growth rates (2.5 percent) and to burgeoning under- and unemployment rates (40 and 20 percent).
As soon as we boarded the bus, cutting through rice paddies tended by women in conical hats, surrounded by teary-eyed water buffaloes and frenetic ducks, I knew I was in another world.

It felt like Vietnam instantly. I could almost taste the explosives in the air.

Scientific expeditions into Third World locales evolve into a weird mix of wanting to be open to a culture and attacking it with these disassociations. With Vietnam, there was emotional baggage and the statistics of war:

• 2 million civilians killed in the north, 2 million in the south;
• 1.1 million military casualties; 600,000 wounded;
• 58,183 Americans (eight of them women) killed;
• 3,869 fixed-wing aircraft and 4,857 helicopters lost;
• 15 million tons of ammunition expended;
• 2,000 Americans and 300,000 Vietnamese missing in action.

So many millions of acres of rain forest and mangroves were destroyed. More than 6 million lives were lost from 1954 to 1975. America introduced the concept of “ecocide” — warfare on the ecology — that still affects each new generation with carcinogenic and mutagenic dioxin from herbicides in human breast milk.

But I hadn’t come to Vietnam to unload a war catharsis.

“The war against America has little relevance in the minds of the people today, as opposed to how people in the U.S. feel about it,” Gene Reddic, a copy editor in Hanoi with the Vietnam Investment Review, told me.

“They don’t live it everyday … the Vietnam war does not conjure up B-52’s bombing Hanoi, and they don’t see Americans as evil people,” he added.

I felt alone for much of the time I worked in Vietnam, and not only because I was the only American in a group of 23 British, Canadian and Vietnamese scientists.

It wasn’t separation from familiar surroundings that stirred the feeling, or the fact that we were bivouacking for three months in primary rain forest — a cloud island, really, and hundreds of miles from Hanoi, just a few clicks from Laos. The raw primal rain forest we had come to study as a part of an international biodiversity project wouldn’t account for the strange separateness I would be feeling. My isolation came from being an American in a sea of Vietnamese — more than 83 million of them in an S-shaped country the size of Italy but with a per capita annual income of just $270.

It has one of the world’s highest population densities for any agricultural country. And then there is the “onslaught.” The 1986 economic reform program, known as Doi Moi, or “open door,” has brought an incredible Westernization — not only of Hanoi’s storefronts, but in the mindset of the people who find themselves actually desiring Western capitalism.

There is almost a lust for the new life, with disregard for tradition, spirituality and the environment.

I felt like an intruder — big, burly, full of extra calories, my dollars gold. I was an American returning with my father’s ghost haunting me.

Many of us have the “secondary Vietnam aftershock”: episodes with friends who had been to Vietnam now self-medicating with drugs, booze, violence. I have taught Vietnam draftees at community colleges — students with faraway gazes who couldn’t cope with festering emotions. All the land mines at home.

“I have buddies who did the tunnel-rat thing, the deep jungle sapping,” said Brian O’Connor, a 42-year-old Ohioan who was swapping stories at the Apocalypse Now bar in Hanoi. “But you have to remember, most of the servicemen were not in combat zones. I had two tours, and I fell in love with Saigon — no bullets. Just the occasional knifing or bottle bomb.”

Almost 3.2 million Americans, including more than 7,000 service women, served in Vietnam during America’s one and a half decades here. Around 80 percent were rear echelon or support; less than 20 percent ever saw combat.

“It’s still something talked about in our schools in Germany,” said Petra Buchbinder, a 24-year-old German traveler and backpacker who has been working as an English teacher in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and Hanoi. “Almost nothing about Hitler and the Third Reich, but much on the fire bombing and My Lai massacre. When I see Americans over here, I wonder if that one or this one fought here … and what they must have seen, or what dark horrors they carry with them.”

Buchbinder said after 18 months living in Saigon and Hanoi, she’s developed a “sixth sense” about foreigners. “I am 90 percent correct when I try to guess if he is American, if he has seen combat here.” It’s the look in their eyes, she insisted.

I had to press hard to get older folk — 40 or older — to talk about the war. In Hanoi, Hue and Vinh, people didn’t want to broach topics of combat duty or flights from carpet-bombing.

However, south of the Ben Hai River, the zone area along the 17th parallel that demarcated the war (DMZ), many spoke of killing Viet Cong. Others lamented how they had lost and been shuttled to reeducation camps set up by the communists after “the victory.”

Quang Tri, Cam Lo, Rockpile, Lang Vay and Hamburger Hill are just a few of the places these South Vietnamese fought at, places that saw bloody battles and ended up on television in America’s living rooms.

They had done hard labor in camps, and now they’re working the streets for big tourists to pay 50 cents for long rides on their cyclos. Others are street sweepers or sledging boulders.

I saw older women working on road gangs, hauling boulders and hot tar and baskets of sand. “The pro-Americans, the elite, or sympathizers were stripped of jobs, impoverished, received no education,” Reddic said. “Those that held land were basically evicted and singled out for reeducation.”

Because the north didn’t suffer as much from the Americans, compared to the south, a lot of tension exists between the north and south.

“The north fears the south breaking away. The south was more enterprising,” Reddic said. Of course, during the war, the U.S. government pumped in billions that built up infrastructure and provided capital for private and public works projects.

The war with America may have pitted the south against the north, but Vietnam has been at war with invaders for more than a thousand years. “The Vietnamese have a history of always protecting themselves, always throwing out the big guy. Like China, Japan, the U.S.,” said Tim Carr, a New York journalist who worked in Hanoi for two years.

An owner of three cafes — including the Memory Cafe, a hot spot for expatriates and foreign travelers looking for rental bicycles, motorcycles and tours around Hanoi — 37-year-old Tam Hang recalls B-52 bombing raids against Hanoi in the early part of 1970 and then three years later.

“I saw my aunt and uncle and friends laid out on the street when we were finally let out of the bomb shelter at school. There were thousands lined up and covered with sheets during just one attack. I still remember the sound of the bombs. I don’t forget the war, the smell of rotting flesh, but I am not against Americans,” Tam said.

Vietnam wants Americans back. This is true of the north, which saw some physical damage from American warplanes, as well as the south, which received the bulk of 13 million tons of bombs and tons of napalm and white phosphorus, as well as most of the 20 million gallons of Agent Orange sprayed on millions of acres of forest, cropland and mangroves.

When I was singled out of our group as an American, dozens of people, young and old, anywhere — in Hanoi’s old quarter at cobra and dog meat stalls, or at Buddha pagodas along the banks of the jade-tinged Perfume river in Hue, or in Con Cuong, an outback town full of loggers — would seek me out for handshakes and embraces.

They bowed and shoved to get a closer look. They measured my wrists and ankles. They stroked blond forearms hairs, bowed as if I held some prominence, and always laughed.

The younger ones wanted to know how much money I made; how much my diver’s wristwatch cost; why I was in Vietnam; what kind of car I owned. Others, older with war-weary eyes, tried in broken English or French to tell me their exploits. They secreted envelopes addressed to relatives living in the States and stuffed them into my pockets.

North Vietnam was victorious in the 15-year war with America, although “Uncle” Ho Chi Minh wasn’t alive to witness it.

Victory shows in crumbling buildings and ox-carts towing dung and human waste (night earth) for subsistence farms, and smoky Russian buses ferrying dozens of passengers crammed among blocks of tea leaves and live pigs and duck along Vietnam’s potholed roads built by the French and the United States.

Those first two weeks in and around Hanoi, we prepared to make the plunge into a bio-dome where rare Asiatic elephants, Javan rhinoceroses and a newly discovered species, a bovine called the pseudoryx, roam.

It was here where I was rushed with images of a rural country permanently sunk by “victory.” A country now overhauling itself daily, overloading itself with Japanese electronics and American clothing trends.

I was taken aside by expatriates who told me about yet-unexplored Buddhist temples. Surfers right out of the “summer of love” traced my maps showing me where the best waves where hitting China Beach. Vietnamese businessmen bought me syrupy, sweet coffee, pitching ventures for exporting jade or importing computers. Scientists making $50 a month asked me to send them Western books on entomology and taxonomy.

So many changes are taking place in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City weekly. The streets are a riot of bicycles, motorcycles and trucks. And time is running out to preserve the environment and study the few pockets of relatively untouched territory left.

And yet the concept of “biodiversity” is foreign, treated like a guided missile from the West. Even the word “conservation” barely made it into Vietnam’s lexicon a few years ago.

“You’d be in the same position if you exchanged shoes with us,” said Cao Vang Sung, deputy director of zoology and ecology for Vietnam’s Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources. “People need to cut wood for food and medicine. Biodiversity from your Western point of view forgets to look at the overall effects of a country’s living standard.”

I kept asking myself what I was doing here trying to collect data on this country’s mammals, plants, insects, ethnic minorities. It’s so poor, so backward, so unreceptive to outside help, so paranoid about foreigners.

A poet friend from Cleveland who had been a Vietnam vet put it best: “We spent so much time and money and lives to topple that country, and now Americans are going back 25 years later to help restore a country it helped destroy. It’s crazy, weird.” Schizophrenic.

“All these wars have put the Vietnamese into a short-term mentality … turning everything into a commodity — trees, animals, women and children,” says Reddic with a sigh.

I’m back at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport Oregon, part of the Oregon State University campus harboring marine mammal-fisheries-benthic-ocean researchers and students.

The topic: How humans decimated whale populations through hundreds of years of industrial whaling, leaving some species and populations on the brink of extinction. But despite these impacts, many whale populations have made remarkable recoveries, demonstrating the ability of threatened and endangered species to bounce back from intense human pressure.

The presenter: Joshua Stewart, a new faculty member at OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, PhD from Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

The running joke with Stewart last night was he WAS not Bradley Cooper, and so he let people know not to be too disappointed that instead of that overpaid undertalented Holly-Dirt guy (my phrasing) we were in for a presentation by a nerd, a passionate whale guy, and young at that!

He’s been focusing on the Southern Right whale and the Antarctic minke, but his interest is also around the many species of whales/cetaceans not recovering despite whaling and hunting of those species having been stopped decades ago.

The history of whaling as a commercial endevour goes back to the Basques, a thousand years ago, gooing after the Right Whale, so called southern Right whale. Then after a few centuries with simple boats, things got going, and in fact the Basques went for Northern Right whales with larger ships. They had a 500 year monopoly on commercial whaling.

The big push in whaling occurred in the 1700s, Nantucket, and that included the big ships of Moby Dick fame. Then, into the 1800s and 1900s the ships had steam engines, and alas the range for these whalers extended far and wide. Processing ships were introduced, with diesel engines and factories on board, and with the adevent of massive industrialization for the two “great” wars, the whalers got explosive harpoons and fast engines.

So, whereas for more than 700 years the blue and fin whales were too fast for the simple whalers, hence they were not being decimated by the whalers of that age. In the 1950s, however, as Stewart stated, more than three million whales were killed, which he calls the largest cull of wild mammales in the world. Many species became “commercially extinct,” i.e. the few numbers left in these species were not profitable enough for the big commercial operations.That included blues, sperms and fin whales.

I cut my teeth in the early 1970s on fighting whaling, that is, the commercial whaling tyranny. That effort globally — stopping whaling — super-charged the first Earth Day:

We are now 53 years later, and guys like Stweart, 35, is looking at declining whale populations, including the Southern Resident Orcas:

There are 73 (total) of these distinct salmon eaters left, and the issues around climate change, habitat degradation and their prey availablity play into any researcher’s tool chest. Many of these iconic animals generations ago were part of the live capture “industry” to supply killer whales to theme parks.

The issue around sea traffic, the noise from that traffic, the pollutants in that Salish Sea (Vancouver and Seattle area), the food stock (Chinook salmon) and climate change play into the degradation of the Southern Residents, as their offspring are coming out smaller, stressed, and a skinny whale triples the probability of dying in the first year of life.

There were around fifty of us there, March 23, and the auditorium allowed for the first time the beer and wine drinkers to bring in their libations. There were fellow researchers in attendence, as well as students, both graduate and undergraduate. As far as the public, it seems that most people going to these talks are associated with academia or marine research. As I point out time and time again — where are the K12 kids? This was a 6 pm event. Stewart’s slide show/Power Point was good, and he is young (he kept alluding to the fact he is doing research on the backs of oldtimers still working as researchers). This is an existential crisis in my mind. Having like minded, fellow marine wonks at an event is NOT enough in 2023. It’s barely anything, really. There are no outreach programs for K12 and families and fisher folk, and since this is after school hours, there seems to be no way in hell of getting high schools students who are interested in science and math and engineering in general to come out to these events. America is a cultural waste land, and one with dream hoarders ruling over the rest of us.

This is the echo chamber that is science, in my estimation. I can’t fault the students there from OSU, or the retired faculty or the active faculty, but this sort of event I have attended in the hundreds over the course of 50 years as a diver, then student of marine sciences, journalist, writer, educator and sustainability “wonk.”

There are no avenues now in 2023 built-in to go above and beyond, and surely, the happy hours/social hour from 5 to 6 pm could have been an hour where students got a little tour of the Hatfield which does have a public access educational center:

Yes, we have the Oregon Aquarium, a commercial marine park of sorts. And the Hatfield Visitor Center does get public attendance, but the K12 schools here in Lincoln county need to do outreach. We also need crab and fisher folk here to to have an open discussion with these wonky folk like Joshua Stewart who may or man not agree with the mitigation ideas, including limiting catches, closing seasons, biodigradable lines, and more.

Here’s my piece on the Oregon Aquarium: Depth of Experience? 20 years with Oregon Coast Aquarium gives CEO deep blue view of world

And, I’ve covered many of the researchers at Hatfield and in our Coastal area:

A story with bite

In otter news

I am finding many of my stories I did for Oregon Coast Today have vanished from the sister company, Discover Our Coast. This is disturbing, the culling of my work, as always. However, I have a book with all those stories captured in their original form, here: Coastal People inside a Deep Dive: stories about people living on the Central Coast and other places in Oregon

Back to Stewart, AKA “not” Bradley Cooper: His work looks at the last two decades of declines with spring chinook salmon, through the San Juan Islands up to Vancouver Island. That’s an 85 percent decline in those salmon. As the orcas’ food stock, that means their lives are now in peril because of all those other factors, including food availability.

Here on the Coast we have the iconic gray whales, coming from breeding grounds in Mexico and Central America, making their way to the Arctic. We have whale watching as one tourist attraction, as the gray whales hang out here and push volumes of water into the sand to eat the anthropods that make small tubes as their feeding ritual. The only whale — a baleen whale, filter feeder, that is — which does this sort of feeding is “our” gray whale.

Here’s another piece: Gray Whales Are Dying: Starving to Death Because of Climate Change

And another: Understanding the ocean’s web of life

And another: Experts paint sobering potential for sea change

So, those gray whales, while in a state of recovery and delisted from the Environmental Species Act list, are still experiencing massive die offs, and the food they get in the Arctic is losing its own biomass, that is, the body weight has declined by one-third in the last fifty years.

So, like orca, gray whales are being studied now with drone photography, and the body shapes can be tracked over entire lifetimes. The lower the weight, the tougher it is on the individual and species in general.

Line entanglements are a big issue, as fishers use lobster and crab “pots” in the tens of thousands on our coast and east coast, with a buoy at the surface. Whales get entangled, and some live days, months and even a year with the gear in tow.

And, ship strikes are becoming a bigger and bigger issue not just on the USA’s coast, but worldwide.

Obviously, if there are more Fraser River spring chinook salmon, then there will be a healthier Southern Resident Killer Whale population. But fish stocks are decling, and so many other factors play into the marine mammals’ overall health worldwide.

Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare’s? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel’s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all. Why then do you try to ‘enlarge’ your mind? Subtilize it.

–Hermann Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 74 – “The Sperm Whale’s Head”

While gray whales were almost hunted to extinction, with 1,000 left, they have been delisted from the ESA — now estimated to be around 20,000 total population. However, researchers like Joshua are looking at these UME’s, Unusual Mortality Events.

2019-2023 Gray Whale Unusual Mortality Event along the West Coast and Alaska: Since January 1, 2019, elevated gray whale strandings have occurred along the west coast of North America from Mexico through Alaska. This event has been declared an Unusual Mortality Event (UME).

There are so many issues that marine mammals face in this industrialized, highly toxic and waste heavy modern society. Lobster/crab gear entanglements are possibly a small problem when compared to the microplastic now found in the zooplanton’s, anthropods’ and the whale’s bodies. Add to that mercury and PCBs, and we have a triple toxic soup for the mammals.

We can imagine what the carrying capacity is for one whale species, and these researchers have “cool” jobs when they get to go out to sea and chase whales and tag them and photograph them and collect their feces, for sure. Here, yet another piece from my work attending these Science on Tap Hatfield events: Whales and People: A Tragedy! (note: you will see two live links referenced here in this story, which are now no longer available; I have a sneaking suspicion that the university’s thugs, PR spinners, got to the publisher of Discover Our Coast, to knock out all articles tied to OSU that I wrote!)

At the end of the talk, I asked Joshua to look at the glass half EMPTY. A few in the crowd were not happy about “ending on a negative note” (Yikes, this is academic in a nutshell). His biggest fear is climate change, which is warming seas, that is, where certain areas of the ocean are heating up faster than others. Sea ice is melting earlier and capping over later (according to the past 80 years or more data), and food stocks for marine mammals are become less and less.

This is the continuing story of extinction, and the supreme right of homo sapiens consumopithecus to rule the world, rule all species, and rule even a majority of our own species in this criminal and corrupting and colluding Capitalism. And, well, green washing and green pornography have taken center stage, man, in the so called sustainability arena. I was head of many sustainability initiatives. Here, a long time ago: Sustained Discussion And, from a standing column I headed up, Metro Talk: Facing uncertainty, the Inland Empire needs more than a global warming bucket list

I showed many a class as a college teacher, Empty Oceans Empty Nets

The film is 2002!

So much work put into research and documentary making. But is it all echo chamber, now that the world is run totally by banks, hedge funds, Blackrock, Vanguard, Pharma-Media-Military-Congressional-Mining-Oil-Gas-Prison-Insurance-Surveillance-IT-AR-Digital Complex? Empty Nets, Emptying Oceans, Farming the Sea, and Soylent Green is People?

On a happy note, the crowd at Hatfield drank locally produced IPA’s, Oregon wine and locally backed pasteries. There was not mention of Greta’s honory doctorate from Helsinki, and Putin was not blamed for the the UME’s.

All was well at OSU, as if the world outside was outside of the bubble that is academia. Your choice, Stewart or Cooper!