… a rich, fertile, beautiful land, capable of satisfying all the needs of its people – It could be paradise on earth if it belonged to the people, not to a small owning class

It’s a no-brainer everyday should be women’s appreciation day. Sure, we have these Hallmark milestones in the country – Black History Month, Native American Culture Month and now, March, Women’s History Month.

[Death toll in Bangladesh garment factory fire rises – CBS News Nov.25, 2012 ]

My own roots are embedded with strong independent women mentors. For my Scottish grandmother, she came over to Canada as a teen and worked all her life as a cook, nanny, hospital nutritionist. She played the stock market on low wages and set up her only child with some decent funds.

My mother was a single mother with my half-sister. She went from Vancouver — where her husband was a playboy with a gambling problem who had the “mafia” after him — to Flagstaff, then to Hermosa Beach, and then she married my father. Mona, my mom, was the central force of several military wives groups in places like Paris, France, Munich, Germany and Tucson.

My aunt Edna came from England to Massachusetts with two other women from the old country. They opened up an ice-cream shop in Northampton, and then eventually got deep into the restaurant field setting up a high end eatery called The Whale Inn.

I went there on vacations, recalling the stories of Liz Taylor and one of her husbands having a marriage reception there.

I absorbed stories of my German great grandmother Elfrieda who as a midwife in North Dakota and Minnesota delivered hundreds of babies. Another relative, an aunt, survived the allied bombing of Dresden with her five children. She helped an entire neighborhood live by scurrying them into an abandoned warehouse cellar she had used for potatoes and cauliflower.

The first women’s day in the USA – Feb. 28, 1909 — occurred a year after the Manhattan garment workers’ strikes when 15,000 women marched for better wages and working conditions. Most of them were teenage girls who worked 12-hour days. Then, in 1911, in one factory, Triangle Shirtwaist Company (where female employees were paid $15 a week in sweatshop conditions: low level lighting, in tight conditions at sewing machines) 145 female workers were killed in a fire. This pushed lawmakers to finally pass legislation meant to protect factory workers through stringent safety measures.

[Triangle Factory Fire Photograph by Granger]

Fast-forward to today: I’m teaching a memoir writing class at OCCC-Waldport with mostly women in attendance. Memoirs are different than autobiographies, and this publishing arena is now greatly populated by women memoirists. All three “textbooks” I use in the class were written by women. Additionally, Mary Karr’s The Liars Club, and Cheryl Strayed’s, Wild, are two memoirs we reference.

Time and time again, memoir writing classes I’ve facilitated in Texas, Washington and here have been predominately attended by women who for all intents and purposes are the keepers of the family history.

Throughout my career as educator and journalist, I have seen more and more women take the lead in many fields. One magazine article I published focused on the graduating class at Washington State University’s veterinarian sciences program. All those DVM graduates were women.

The dean of the school stated there is an active recruiting campaign to get “more men into the field.” Imagine that, women undertaking vet sciences, which in 1950 was almost exclusively a male-dominated field.

The reasons for the shift in gender representation are complicated, but one truism stands: Veterinarian sciences is largely a pet field, one where communication with pet owners is vital. It is a field where the patient is actually the human. From field, to barn, to yard, to house, to bed – that’s the shift in the veterinarian field, as illustrated by our dogs and cats.

It begs the question: Are men as empathetic and responsive to the patient’s owner’s psychological and spiritual needs as women?

One of my areas of study, marine sciences, has seen a break in the male domination to sometimes a 50-50 representation of women in some grad programs.

But there are still rough waters: In 2019, on World Oceans Day, the theme was “gender and the ocean.” According to Robin Nelson, a biological anthropologist at Santa Clara:

We frame science as this idea that folks with the best ideas, folks who are willing to work hard, are those who are going to succeed. But absent safeguards protecting vulnerable scientists, she said, those folks who could be super talented, wonderful scientists get pushed out of our fields.

Peter Girguis, an oceanographer at Harvard University, echoes this:

In the absence of gender equality, we’re doing mediocre science.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed “Women’s History Week” in March to coincide with International Women’s Day. Seven years later, Congress declared all of March to be “Women’s History Month.”

There are problems with “a month,” as Kimberly A. Hamlin, an associate professor of history at Miami University in Ohio and author of Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener, states:

But Women’s History Month unintentionally reinforces the prevailing idea that when women do something, it is called ‘women’s history,’ and when men do something it is called ‘history.’ Women’s History Month also allows state school boards and curricular committees to feel as though they are including women without doing enough to update textbooks and state standards, ultimately undermining the very goals that reformers and historians aimed to achieve with the designation.

I clearly remember when I was the only “guy” in the women’s literature class I took at the University of Arizona where I eventually received a BA and BS. I learned so much about women in history, not just female writers.

We are talking 102 years ago when the 19th amendment granted some women the right to vote (a number of other laws prohibited Native American women, Black women, Asian American women, and Latinx women from voting, among others).

In that lit class, I learned a bit of historical misstatement: What was deemed the first expedition to sail around the globe on a voyage to study and sample the world’s oceans occurred in 1872. Of the 243 people on board the Challenger, not one was a woman.

However, it wasn’t the first. Nearly a century before the Challenger voyage, a woman — Jeanne Baret — sailed around the world on a scientific expedition of her own. She disguised herself as a male assistant on a 1766 voyage led by a French explorer to document plants and ecosystems in distant countries. Baret is the first woman on record to have circumnavigated the globe.

“7 Countries With Horrific Sweatshop Situations”

+–+

To continue with the piece above, which will be in the local rad, out here in Lincoln Co, Oregon (Central Coast), I have to put in some work of a feminist and radical, Linda Ford:

Elizabeth McAlister, in jail since April, remains steadfast, modest and unassuming. She hesitates to give interviews. She did write after her arrest about why she resists the Empire’s weapons: ‘We came to Kings Bay Submarine Base animated by the absurd conviction that we could make some impact on slowing if not ending, the mad rush to the devastation of our magnificent planet.’

Such sentiments, such absurd convictions, that anyone can interfere in the Empire’s global destruction, have to be punished. Such female dissenters have to be jailed and silenced. There should be no more silence surrounding America’s women politicals. Whether considered terrorist threats because, like Aafia Siddiqui, they are part of a group deemed an enemy race; or considered terrorist threats because, like Elizabeth McAlister, they resist and expose America’s global domination—such women will be made political prisoners of the Empire.

— “Women Politicals of the American Empire” by Linda Ford (DV)

“In The Eye of the Beholder: USA History of Imprisoning Women Politicals” (DV) Part One of review and discussion of Linda G. Ford’s Women Politicals in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart

&

“Long Live the Armed Struggle!” (DV) Part Two of book review, and … The Revolution Will Not Be Televised or plugged onto Twitter, or in the Streets with Your Placards, or Sending in ‘Save the Whale’ Postcards

I was born a protester … My mother had to go to the school a lot and talk to the principal.

— Dorli Rainey (In conversation with author Paul Haeder)

I am being jailed because I have advocated change for equality, justice, and peace. … I stand where thousands of abolitionists, escaped slaves, workers and political activists have stood for demanding justice, for refusing to either quietly bear the biting lash of domination or to stand by silently as others bear the same lash.

— Marilyn Buck, at her 1990 sentencing (epigram in Linda Ford’s book, Women Politicals in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart)

*Quote from, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. In Spokane, WA, 19 years old. She went to lumber camps in Montana and Washington, speaking at IWW meetings. She stated she fell in love with her country.

+–+

This is not a blanket endorsement of all women, all of those of the female persuasion not having baby blood on their hands. In capitalism, the male dominated death machine is easily transferred to the other sex.

[ Women in Defense, a career development and networking organization affiliated with the National Defense Industrial Association, a leading industry group. ]

Offensive-polluting-skin peeling-depleted uranium fed-bunker busting-napalm spreading-TNT concussions Industries, described by the misnomer as Defense Industries (Edward Bernays would be smiling), they have garnered the woke label with their CEOs in pant suits and skirts: Definitely do not ask these women over to babysit — that is, if the baby is not blue-eyed, blond, white or of the red-white-and-blue variety.

As of Jan. 1, the CEOs of four of the nation’s five biggest defense contractors — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defense arm of Boeing — are now women. And across the negotiating table, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer and the chief overseer of the nation’s nuclear stockpile now join other women in some of the most influential national security posts, such as the nation’s top arms control negotiator and the secretary of the Air Force. (How Women Took Over the Killing Machine, AKA, MIC!) 

It’s a watershed for what has always been a male-dominated bastion, the culmination of decades of women entering science and engineering fields and knocking down barriers as government agencies and the private sector increasingly weigh merit over machismo.

And, as Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson told POLITICO, it’s also the result of “quieting that little voice in your head that doubts whether you can do that next job or take on that special assignment.”

But turn yourself blue trying to convince the Norte Americanos that war is bad, that when Nazi’s get supported by the USA in places like, err, Ukraine, that THAT in itself is really that region’s issue, and that missiles and guidance systems and bioweapons and cluster bombs, the lot of it, guided by these hailed women above, well, they do the bloody work the same, whether the CEO is male or female. Though, I have to say, all this macho stuff pushed down the Marvel Comic Book bred Norte Americanos, for decades, you know, the Charlie’s Angels jujutsu and now the Black Double Oh Seven, it has done the job of convincing redneck women that their role in this game is to, well, kill babies descriminately and indescriminately.

Because they are baby killers!

Yet, feminists should not view this ​“rise” of women as a win. Feminism, as the most recent wave of imperial-feminist articles shows, is increasingly being co-opted to promote and sell the U.S. military-industrial complex: a profoundly violent institution that will never bring liberation to women — whether they are within its own ranks or in the countries bearing the greatest brunt of its brutality. As Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney and assistant professor at George Mason University, put it in an interview with In These Times, women’s inclusion in U.S. military institutions ​“makes the system subjugating us stronger and more difficult to fight. Our historical exclusion makes it [appear] desirable to achieve [inclusion] but that’s a lack of imagination. Our historical exclusion should push us to imagine a better system and another world that’s possible.” — (“Against the Feminist-Washing of US Militarism“)

Here, the real heroes, a la women:

[Global Witness report points out that women who act as social leaders are the main victims of murder for carrying out their work. / Photo: Global Witness NGO ]

Finally, put a dress on this person. A little bit of eyeliner. High heels. Hmm, replace one criminal, a male, with a female criminal, and we still have criminalty:

“Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed
How US military spending keeps rising even as the Pentagon flunks its audit.”

“Holding U.S. Treasurys? Beware: Uncle Sam Can’t Account For $21 Trillion.”

Or not:

Meet the first female 3-star general in the US military]

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a colour photograph of God Almighty — and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable.

What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bennington College Address (1970)

Something compelling and sad about that life. Kurt. Born and raised in Indianapolis, (1922-2007). Iconic. More than Slaughterhouse Five.

I remember the reading, at UT-El Paso, my first year in the English graduate program — why that, and I was working for newspapers, had a language gig, one-on-one, in Juarez with a Mexican engineer working for Packard Electric. I was deep into writing stories and a novel. Lots of cross border ruckus stuff. Drugs and some other cross-the-tortilla-curtain smuggling. That was October 19, 1983. Two feet from fame.

It may have just been a coincidence it was a Homecoming event, but he was there, speaking to graduate students in a classroom. Then after the reading, a party. The obligatory party.

Wine, whisky, tequila. Kurt was looking for Pall Malls, and I had two packs ready — cheap cigs from Juarez. I brought a bottle of mescal, with the worm, and we talked — me, Vonnegut and two other folk. But he and I talked face to face. I had no fear, no compunction to put anyone on pedestals, and we talked about Dresden and some of my life.

I grabbed Dixie cups, threw some lime wedges into each one and poured me, Kurt and the two other people shots of the agave drink.

These guys and gals are many times inquisitive about the people who parachute into their lives — young people, like myself. Twenty-six and with a donkey cart full of stories already. I had family who surived that bombing in Dresden — in fact, my Canadian mom, divorced from my German father, had the sugar, salt, flour and grease ceramic flower containers that were buried for safekeeping in Dresden. They survived that bombing.

Vonnegut never survived that role he played as a captured US soldier picking up the carcuses of the dead in Dresden.He was deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse, schlachthof fünf (5). He survived the allied bombing.

We’re talking several days of heavy bombers from US Air Force and RAF, up to 1,350 aircraft in total, with their payloads ready for factory, neighborhood, family and town — 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices. Like all UK-American bombing, a firestorm ensued, which destroyed more than 1,600 acres of the city and more than 25,000 were killed with so many more wounded, and yet more psychologically scarred.

Kurt was one of those who never recovered. His book, Slaughterhouse Five, took years to write, coming out in 1969. It is an anti-war book. I saw him again 20 years later, in Spokane, at a reading and then, the proverbial party afterwards. Pall Malls he still chain smoked. This crowd was a bigger crowd, and I remember having that chance to go over to him and rejiggering his memory. The party in one of the faculty’s houses in New Mexico. Two horses and the fields of giant green chiles growing. And the bottle of worm-blessed mezcal.

I know this seems narcissistic, but the guy remembered me, recalled that night, and the drinking of the agave fermented elixir. He asked about that mezcal again. I repeated that I had just come back from Mexico a few years earlier, and spent time in Oaxaca where there are thousands of acres of agave plants (200 varieties) grown for tequila and mezcal. I told him about how the curanderos and even the narcotraficantes use the liquor in their ceremonies and baptismals, as in vetting their sicarios in the drug runners mafia. Hired killers.

Some of what we talked about went back to El Paso, and then he kept asking me about my life in Mexico, and the booze. He wondered why this time I hadn’t brought a bottle of the mezcal with the gusano (worm) sunk at the bottom. I told him that tequilas were becoming trendy and boutique brewed. I said that mezcal was becoming popular too, thanks to the marketing of it in Mexico on the international stage.

He told me he recalled being really inebriated, and that he had some crazy dreams. “No hangover inthe morning. I so wanted to call you to let you know you were right. The dreams and the lack of headache.” He laughed hard, smoke pouring out of his mouth around bedraggled teeth.

His memory was jarred, and he laughed at something he remembered out there in El Paso. He liked the wild west aspect of the town, and the good Mexican food, and he liked the mix of people. Almost all the students who listened to him were of Mexican descent. The department — English Department — wasn’t 87 percent Latino (like the town), but we did have a few in our ranks. The school itself drew people from around Mexico, Latin America and Africa. Engineering. Nursing. Mining. Not many documented or undocumented immigrants were rooting for their children to go get a useless degree in English literature or creative writing. For the most part. In Spokane he was railing against Bush and Cheney. The neocons. He was only a few years from his untimely death.

He and I talked intensely (as intensely as Kurt could be because he always had that raspy laugh, like a two-stroke lawnmower engine choking down, barely hanging onto a spark). he laughed a lot. But when it came to Bush and war, he was serious. He talked a lot about Bush. He asked about El Paso. He asked about my own threadbare travels and even more threadbare writing (paid publishing) career (sic).

I told him the Mexican saying — “Para todo mal, mezcal, y para todo bien, también; y si no hay remedio litro y medio” — For all bad, mezcal, and for all good, as well; and if there is no remedy, liter and a half.

He asked how the hell I got from Mexico and El Paso to Spokane, to Gonzaga. I tried to squeeze in as much as I could before our talk was overcome by hangers on, the groupies. I told him that even now, after 20 years, I was still teaching as an adjunct, and that I was still organizing part-timers in a union. I also told him I was fiddling around another degree, a masters in urban and regional planning. He know who Jane Jacobs was. The two of them lived in New York, and Kurt was also a fan of her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. He too was against the Robert Moses’ project to kill the Village, with the Lower Manhattan Expressway.

This all is percolating inside after watching the Weide documentary, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time. The life of this man, and the life of his family, is laid out, but RObert Weide had an unusual relationship with Vonnegut — more than two decades of friendship. Lots of letters back and forth. The project about this man’s life. Weide was a fan of Vonnegut in high school. He became a filmmaker, and he wanted to capture Kurt’s life in film. This too took Weide a lifetime to produce. It’s a compelling piece, one that is about Kurt, about his failings and his features, about what his kids have to say about Kurt the dad. The ups and downs and ups and downs of his literary life. He was obsessed, and he was almost always a writer.

In so many ways, the movie is about a man out of his own time. He was too old for the Love and Peace Generation, but they adopted him with his iconic books held deep in their souls. Many Vonnegut fans were fans, having never really read his work. I’ve read six of his books, not all of the ones he wrote. I was happy about his books, but I wasn’t obsessed.

Watching this flick, I have a deeper regard for the man, for the country he believed in (one I never believed in) and his world which was big and large on one level, but in many ways, very finite and small. He was a New York and East Coast guy, and he was an icon, a guy who actors and painters and celebrities went to. In his presence, he was a simple guy. I never thought of him as literary. I have been in the company of many literary folk, poets, novelists, journalists.

This is why I adore the time I had with Kurt — limited, two feet from his fame, and now part of the fabric of my own tattered quilt. My life. Failures, mostly, in the literary sense. And this is still stuck in my craw, but I am more resigned with that fact. Timing, disposition, vision, limitations, focus, and a dream. His background is so different from my own. His parts to his whole so different than mine. I’d say nothing we have in common. Nothing, really, but writing, or the knowledge that that is a private and profound thing — to write, to make up and to be a journalist too.

In the documentary, there is a real loneliness that reverberates in this guy’s life. Watch it if you can. About a time long gone. In the context of now, too, with Nazi’s in Ukraine, with the American ghostlands, all the same actors he railed against with the Bush Family and the wars. But, a man like Vonnegut, while immense on many levels, still believed in a lot of goodness in people. Even those in politics. He held a belief that someone was good, something was good about Clinton, and this was before Obama. I can only guess what he would have thought about that charlatan, that war criminal.

They all are. And, now, seeing the propaganda machines in the USA, around the Western world, in the UK and EU, and down under, in Australia, it must be said that the same criminals who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they are the same ones fomenting war and hatred with the psychological operations. With the corporate-legacy-mainstream-commercial media part and parcel of their slick Goebbels-Edward Bernays lying game.

Amazing to see the script flipped, and the USA supporting Nazi’s, and the complete revamping and reqriting of history. Putin as Hitler. What a fucking sad time. He never knew one brother who died in World War Two. Relatives killed and wounded. What a creepy country, and it is also my mother’s birthplace, Canada, that is creepy. My grandparents from UK, Scotland, that part of the world creepy. And, well, those Germans, what are those countrymen saying about Putin? Hitler and Putin? It makes no sense. My family was forced onto the Russian front as German conscripts. My grandfather was a pilot in World War I.

Talk about a sick bile in my throat.

Slaughterhouse Five, and the Nazi’s, and the Allies. One in the same.

Imagine the time I could have spent with Kurt if I had had the chance to pull him aside, take him to Chihuahua, spend a week with him in Mexico. Imagine the education I would have gotten, and the one Vonnegut would have gotten.

Sometimes that slipstream comes from a place of mythology, a dream, some biscuit of exceptionalism. All the soured lies of history. But Vonnegut knew that. He wrote about that. Kids in high school were assigned those books. Breakfast of Champions. Cat’s Cradle. Mother Night.

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!”

Poet Robert Bly reads from The Insanity of Empire on Friday, March 10, from 7-10 pm, including Q & amp;A and book-signing. Tickets: $20; $30, at the door; free, SFCC students. SFCC, Music Auditorium, 3410 W. Fort George Wright Dr. Call 624-1873.

Leaning into the Memoir Writing

by Paul Haeder / February 21st, 2022

Below, an assignment: 

Find some object you hold near and dear. Something that can leap you into backward narrative. Something to hold you as a memoir writer, going back, reflecting back. That thing, you can hold or touch. You find meaning in it. And, that object holds stories. Try and do this under ten pages. 

I plugged the community/continuing education class I designed for the local community college, Oregon Coast, CC, here, at the locak twice-a-week rag: “The art of remaking-retelling a story” (Newport News Times)

I’m big on writing narratives. Almost every person I have met and spent time with has told me their story. That story is sometimes a series of disconnected events. Many time people open up, and tell me about significan emotional events (SEE’s) that changed their lives, one way or another.

And, it’s never that simple, no, the death of a child or a newfound love. Change occurs over time, and that event changes through the seive that is memory. How I was when confronted by federalies in Chiapas 40 years ago is a different story and memory landscape now compared to then, when I was telling all my buddies/compas about that event at Palenque.

So, below, I took the assignment I gave the 7 students to heart. Except, I was angry, I was riffing off of something completely unrelated to the assignment at first: I was asked to review a new novel, in manuscript form, from a fellow who is getting it published. And, man, after reading 200 manuscript pages of the 350 total, I was ready to punch out the world.

Without giving away the author and the press, here is that email to one of my editor friends:

Howdy —  I really do hope you didn’t tell the author I was a “for sure thing” to review his novel. I’m sorry to say that what I’ve been reading thus far (200 pages) I can’t really do any good as a positive reviewer. I know we crossed this bridge before, me having major hiccups with the work of another book (that other novel, remember)  . . . and I know you all have this book in the line-up.

But, shit, guys, I just can’t get into the book at all. I am not going to give you a big rush of negative comments about the bad dialogue, the incongruent characterization, the cut-out characters, and the dead-end plot, and the absolutely wrong way to start a book, and all the dialogue to move along a story, and the lack of verisimilitude. Look, I know I am just a flunky out here in Oregon, but I have been in the fiction game, even with all the rejections over the years, for a very long time. I’ve taught fiction, too. And, I am a deep reader of fiction. I was not expecting Ivan Doig or Jim Crumley or Tom McGuane or Robert Stone, you know, but, seriously, I can’t find anything literary about the book, and I can’t find much to say that would make a review helpful for him or as a way to highlight your new Press’ addition. You know I want to help you all, but there isn’t a  decent poetic or literary hook in it, nor is there a hellava plot, nor is there a helluva cast of characters. There is no electrical charge in the writing.

I hate to do this to you since you both have been good at going with my stuff, and publishing my work in the past. I just wouldn’t be able to pull this one off, without it being just a marketing promo, and I know you do not want that from me. I am sure Mr. S has a following and a slew of people ready to read this book. That bodes well for potential sales, for sure.

I want to be honest and upfront, since I respect you both. I am not your man in Havana for this project. While I have reviewed a hundred books for the El Paso Times years ago, I remember Leslie Ulman giving me a Pam Houston book to review, since she was a guest at UTEP, that is, a visiting author. A friend of hers, as well. I know my clear look at and pugnacious reviewer’s response to that book, once it hit the newspaper (and was syndicated out further afield), caused some rumbling and grumbling with Leslie and Pam, but shit, I didn’t do a hatchet job on it — just some cogent and pithy writing myself as reviewer to point out some of the westerny sort of overkill.

Mr. S’s book is what it is — you all have him on contract and you all have it planned for publication. I just do not want to do a heavy heavy heave ho of my own principles as well as disregarding my own history as a writer and reviewer by attempting something positive. I could have a hell of a fistfight with the book, but that’s not what you all are after.

I see K is on the jacket with kudos. He seems to be your man, really, for this assignment.

I’m not being snarky or elitist or any of that, as you well know me.

It’s not a good book, guys. Not well written. It’s canned dialogue. Cliche. Off the mark. Boring. Not going anywhere. And, yes, he was a journalist, but I can tell you these folk in the book are not real, and as you know, fiction has to be more than pedestrian recording of events. One of the rules is to not move the plot and story and tension with dialogue. That’s most of the book. So much is bad in the book.

Yet, there is that adage that one person’s cup of tequila is another person’s buttermilk. I gotta stick with tequila.  Others love the heavy tasteless milk.

Thanks for thinking of me.

Good luck with it and to him.

It’s not just a slam dunk me writing that critism above. Really. I’ve been hawking my long form, that is, novels, short story collections, essay collections, for a very long time. New York agent named Jack Ryan, and he went to bat for, and he was also waylaid by many a female editor who thought my stuff was too male, too regional, too dark. The list goes on. Cancel culture 1986-2010.

So, really, putting out a review of this book was not possible for me without really evicerating the words, the plot, the entire book, which for me would be a public spiritual homocide. That’s not in my inner core, though I can be super critical and pugnacious when it comes to, well, beautiful people, or those who have made it and are resting on their laurels.

Here, a quick note from the editor in response to my decline —

Paul,

This is the most magnificent decline I have ever read! So glad you are here to keep us honest.

Others had troubles with the book too.

For some reason, I just liked the narrator, but overall that’s probably not enough.

So it goes. This world we live in, the one we always have lived in. Lives interrupted, derailed, denuded, and of course, enhanced by surviving.

Funny how my students are opening up after just three sessions, sharing all manner of things that they want to add to their larger memoir. Here, a bit of Memoir 101:

Memoir vs Autobiography Basics

1. Autobiography usually covers the author’s life — the entire life up to the point of the writing, while memoir focuses only on a part of the author’s life.

There are going to be exceptions to every point on this list, but generally speaking, autobiography aims to be comprehensive, while memoir does not. Autobiographers set out to tell the story of their life, and while some parts will get more detail than others, they usually cover most or all of it.

I do use Mary Karr’s work, the Art of Memoir, in the class. And, Tritine Rainer’s Your Life as Story. 

Here, just one slice of the definition and connotation:

Okay, so here we go with my two hour entranced writing, to get it, that bad read, off my chest or out of my system.

And I sent it to the editor, and he came back with this:

Loved the essay.

Reminds me of the time my girlfriend Lois and I drove from Tucson to the coast in a lark. We picked up a hitchhiker in Big Sur. We dropped him off at a compound of Hobbit cabins in the hills above the surf where his father – Stephen Stills’ dope supplier – gifted us the most potent weed I’d ever smoked. One puff and I fell down on the ground paralized. He said he wanted to give me a couple bags in thanks for bringing his son home,  but I was paranoid with the paralysis. Lois helped me walk to his cabin where we would get our “reward.” He opened a wooden trunk that I was sure held a shotgun that would start a Manson-like killing spree beginning with Lois and me. Instead we got three or four bags of this wild dope that later in our circle in Tucson was called “killer weed”and taken out and smoked on only the most sacred occasions.

 

Okay, then, you the reader now have me the writer in your sights. Enjoy the flow of memoir, in this “literary” essay. God help us all!

+–+

Grizzly Country, a .44 magnum, a Thrown- Away Suitcase, a Cleveland Woman’s Life Scattered — By PK Haeder

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

— opening line, The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

“Did you hear? Catina is going to Mexico with some guy with long hair and earrings in both ears in his old pick-up truck. Can you believe that?”

Not the best opening line for a book but I couldn’t get it out of my head all the way up to that Last Good Kiss bar in Missoula where James Crumley had invited us to sip Patron.

My girlfriend’s North Dakota cousin’s words couldn’t top this: An orange Samsonite suitcase was the gaping open evidence of some meth-ed out former boyfriend who snatched the dark-haired woman in a Montana town and found a lonely path frequented by bruins in order to dump her body along with all her earthly belongings somewhere in that dark dripping night in Big Sky country.

Okay, not Jim Crumley prose, but I wasn’t writing it, just thinking it after we found the two high school yearbooks wet from the afternoon drizzle. The mud that led to our dry campsite held a couple of dozen color snapshots spread around like flattened lives. There was a cool leather fringed leather jack, two pairs of jeans laid out like a running ghost. The lacey underwear I saw first. Half was left in the suitcase, the other half flung around where the case spilled open.

We were twenty miles from Missoula, after heavy tequila toasts with Crumley, and we were in THAT pre-Mexico pick-up truck with the small camper snuggly attached holding all our gear. We wanted to have a campfire, hot coffee and flapjacks in the morning.

It was getting dark, and bear prints were around this mess of scattered things in a woman’s life. Two pink bras, a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt, a bunch of personal letters in envelopes bound by hair bands. This was 1985. There were no cell phones. We were out in the boondocks. It was just me and my girlfriend. We both were friends of Crumley since he was both a professor and my thesis advisor atf UT-El Paso of all places.

[You Can’t Go Home Again]

We had been in his classes, and we taught alongside him as graduate students. He wanted the thrill of Juarez and the West Texas mountains. He was a heavy drinker, liked coke and he dated students. I was able and ready to get him the white stuff. He liked my wild man freedom. He was especially curious about my work in a refugee center helping Central Americans – mostly Guatemalans – get political asylum.

The word was he got sacked (not rehired for his year-to-year visiting writer contractor) because some students complained old Dancing Bear Jim came to the workshops three sheets to the wind. That was 1984, before #metoo. There were accusations of dating graduate students, not a no-no, but at UTEP, with a prude of a president, these rumors were enough to get the writer fired.

My girlfriend, Catina, wasn’t really freaking out at the sight of the splayed suitcase. She had a few theories about why this woman’s personal belongings were about. There was a domestic violence sort of vibe I could feel, the light was diminishing in May, and large snowflakes floated down from the purple sky. I was more paranoid than Catina. I knew I had to be the asshole that might have to pull out both guns and get our asses out of some fucking Gary Gilmore situation. Back then, in my 20s and 30s, I courted such things, literally and in my mind.

“You know, it looks like this girl just tossed this suitcase out as if she was jettisoning part of her life. You know, high school years, busted friendships. Fuck, high school can be like a mind fuck. The shitty girls and the rape-minded motherfucking football players. I guarantee, this girl did not just have the one suitcase. But this one, with photos and journals and letters, that’s my theory. One life gone, a new life in Montana. Maybe Canada. There’s no foul play.”

I liked the way Catina plotted out a story from her personal point of view. I would have never thought of a scenario so close to the female perspective.
We came to Crumley, to get my thesis approved, and now, here, after drinks and buffalo burgers, to see bears. Hell, wasn’t that the irony, Dancing Bear and all, his novel? Make no bones about it, we saw two brown bears when we approached the muddy road down into this killer of an empty campground. Grizzly Campground was the name. It was part of Rock Creek, located in the Ranch Creek drainage. Several campsites bordered the creek, and we picked this one. We had it all to ourselves, and we were high and drunk, and we wanted to pitch a tent, and then this scene unfolded like ball lightning in our veins, right there where we were about to pitch our tent.

I still had a revolver and lever action pair of weapons on my mind. The four-inch buck knife on my leg, well, just for cutting apples and cheese.
We barely touched some of this girl’s things, and we agreed to not rifle through the personal notes and journals. Not just yet. As I said, I had two guns in the camper, and Catina had camped with her Colorado family all over the west her whole life. We were not afraid of wild things. Just men with uppers, booze and sinister thoughts in their blood.

We were in awe of the ferns, the boggy smell reminded me of my mom’s birthplace in British Columbia. Then there was that amazingly metallic and citrus odor in the air, fresh conifer growth. And the water heartbeats of a nice clear creek hitting boulders. We could see the quicksilver flow idraping rocks, granite heavy with moss and lichen.

“Hell, I guess we have to let the cops know about this when we head out. But for now, it’s fire, tent, booze.”

Catina took a few Missoulians and spread them out over the scene of some crime. It was a crime in anyone’s books – to chuck personal correspondence and two high school yearbooks into the mud. Making camp was a quiet time for us, a rarity. Catina was in her thoughts. Her own family demons. I was just stunned with the possibility of having to do some sort of bullshit thing if anyone returned to the scene of the scattering. A crime? My theory was the opposite of Catina’s.

I got the half full bottle of Juarez tequila from the back, tucked in a nice colorful serape from Juarez we were going to gift to Crumley. I took swigs from the bottle. Warm, dry earthy draws back to hot desert. Being up here — with Crumley, and thinking about my own prodigious dance with booze, drugs, adventure and recklessness never seemingly coming come to a bad end, even when I got in a few pickles out in the wilderness with no gas and a hot motorcycle I had to push to find someplace to put down a bedroll — I was invincible with my girlfriend and my guns.

Man, the time I was 18 with my scuba buddy Brian, in the Sea of Cortez, and we had just run out of gas after hours of diving and snorkeling (he continued to say, I told you so . . . we should bought another gas tank). Shit, I told him to stay put, and I went madly swimming toward a marlin fisherman who also happened to be out in the middle of the Sea of Cortez near Tiburon Island. I swam and swam with rocket fins and snorkel-mask. I got there in 30 minutes.

Typical for me: Bad situation turned into a free tow, a party at their condo and still my buddy complained, as he stayed in the one room hotel and pouted. Tequila, steaks, amazing stories, and even getting laid. That’s what running out of fuel in a 16 foot barely-sea worthy boat will get you.
Or get me.

I had promised Catina’s parents back in El Paso that no harm would cometof her on this camping trip. The clearly anxious and chaotic nature of the Samsonite toss and the large area of disarray felt like a foreboding.
Yeah, my own 23-yea- old sister came to mind when the fire was roaring with the agave spirit burning my esophagus. Barely dead a few years.

Roberta was wild, adventurous and killed driving her Harley out of Kamloops south to see me, our sister, mother and father in Arizona. Call us the half brother and half sister. The Army stepdad was on his way out of the country to Saudi Arabia. Robbie insisted on coming down by road, to Tucson, with two male buddies on their rides.

That was 1978 when we got the call that she had hit the pavement after some fucker passed out at the wheel and crossed the lane into her bike.
Another set of adventures, a burial, a wake, after a crazy sea plane into Hyder, Alaska. My mother was there, with her fragile lungs, coming into Alaska on a cold night, which was bright in June. I was her escort, the only other family there. I met her biological dad Rod there, a guy I had met years earlier in Vancouver, when my sister sent me a bus ticket to visit her.

As I write this (and almost everything), her squash blossom turquoise bracelet is by me, sort of a talisman, a reminder, or some ethereal message bugging me to keep plugging away. Here I am sixty-five writing about a forest haunting when I was 28.

Those years, man, 28, Crumley had my book, something I thought would sell: the great American novel set in Mexico. That was what centered in my head then, and even now, almost 40 years later, it’s like a rheumatoid disease, a stupor at times, enchanting me into believing I have the impetus still, now, to push through all the bloody hurdles and walls to get something big published.

That disease lasted for 30 years since that week with Crumley. It’s untreatable. It’s terminal for some. I am one of the unlucky suckers still believing in some fucking New York publishing miracle.

We got the tent set up, as snow slowly powdered the ground. The campground was amazing, the greenest, most jungle like since we had been camping in deserts, along the north rim of the Grand Canyon. In Utah. In New Mexico. Coming from El Paso, we decided to hit the Colorado route.

But this, Grizzly Campground we claimed to ourselves. Hours with Crumley and then my interview at the Missoulian (I never got the job – a dozen out of work PhDs in Missoula looking for writing work, even newspaper work, way ahead of me on the prospect list). We were heading to Livingston, to Chico Hot Springs, to hang out with Crumley and the director of some film Jim was helping script-fix.

The guy – director of Black Beauty, I think — had an option on Dancing Bear and The Last Good Kiss. Time magazine had just done a piece on the up and coming noir writers, and Crumley was one on that list as a killer detective fiction guru. He was from Texas, did shit in the Army, got an MFA from the Iowa writers workshop, and learned from Richard Hugo to study Raymond Chandler in order to become fluent and real and poetic as a novelist.

At 28 with my own suitcase full of real life, adventures, travels, I was an admirer but not a fan boy, really, of the complete Crumley, though he did resist paying taxes as a protest against the Vietnam War. I was all life, fiction, journalism, politics and considered myself left of Che.

That suitcase, the fire Catina had stoked well, the waning light, the creepy icy white on all the ferns and low limbs of amazing conifers made for a Crumley noir setting. Then, juxtaposed with our own plans to take this Datsun pick-up all the way to Guatemala loaded with scuba gear and typewriters. Then, we’d be heading to the Yucatan after hitting every Mexican state. Stories for the two dailies in El Paso. Rolls of film sent to the editors.

There is something about the personal belongings of someone – a woman’s make-up accouterments, the undergarments, the letters, hair brush and berets – spread out all over the place in the open. No tire tracks to speak of, except ours. And, to be sure, I did make a head-lamp and hand-held flashlight recon of the area within a mile of the camp.

The idea Catina had was she just lost it. Threw the shit away in a rage. Something about the past, all those journals and yearbooks. Mind you, we had not rifled through anything yet, and we did not pull things out of the suitcase. We did, however, bring the scattered remains of the orange travel case back to the center of the dirt road.

The newspapers were getting covered in snow. We were shivering. The tent was perfect near the fire. I drank Juarez tequila and Catina sipped a bottle of merlot. Granola and gouda we consumed while we were deep in our literary and gumshoe thoughts.

The pile of belongings I kept pointing the strong flashlight at (actually, a diving light, with a huge veronica of bright beams) — the covered-up life of this woman. And, I saw eyes, in the distance. Bear whiskers. We had the food in the camper sealed up. We tried to keep crumbs away from everything. Nothing in the tent would attract a bear. I even had a big can of bear spray. And the fucking .44 magnum and 30.30 Marlin.

There were bears out there. That’s what we came for, but we didn’t count on the broken suitcase and a life strewn all over the place.

There was some essence of Cherri Halister the next morning. That’s what her name was. We looked hard and long in the yearbooks. She was there, circled, with “The best one at the party. . . . three-fisted drinker . . . why do we have to graduate now, now that we are just becoming friends?” Other tributes and benedictions from her graduating friends. She looked like Barbara Hershey – Remember her, in The Last Summer, Boxcar Bertha, The Baby Maker? Catina knew Barbara, and of course, later, she did Hannah and Her Sisters, and played Mary Magdalena in The Last Temptation of Christ.

Hell, my younger sister Heidi was an extra in a movie with Charlton Heston, The Last Hard Men. Barbara Hershey took a liking to my kid sister. Heidi was nine years old; it was shot at Old Tucson, the movie lot that burned down. I took her to the set many times. I watched Heston and Hershey plod along in some of the scenes that needed the old western cutout town. I told Catina that, and she laughed, telling me that I would be famous one day for being just this far on the edge of fame – she put both her hands out and sized up that fame around 18 inches.

She was right.

This is a place I never heard of, Mayfield High School, in Cleveland. The Wildcats. The year books were for 1968 and 1969. If she was 18 upon graduation, this Cherri Halister would be 34 when we found her stuff all over the forest.

We were entranced by the pile of belongings, but I had pangs of paranoia that something bad really did happen to her . . . or some fuckers might be coming back. I had the Ruger holstered on my hip and the Marlin fully loaded and on the front seat of the Datsun.

I sort of knew those two firearms would be added props for the story I was going to tell Crumley, and all the friends I had back in El Paso, in Tucson, and doctor family back east. Guns, long-haired guy with earrings in both ears, a blue Datsun king cab pickup, a girlfriend who knows how to get a campfire going in sleet and rain, and some flagging belief that a guy like Crumley would actually help me get a novel published.

Sure, a few hours with Peter Fonda and some other notables at Chico Springs was filed away in my Irish storytelling satchel. Crumley introduced me to him. Then the lore of, well, Richard Brautigan who, after meeting Thomas McGuane (another Montana writer), he would eventually visit Montana’s Paradise Valley and buy a 40-acre ranch in Pine Creek, near Livingston. All that lore, man, and yet, the trip, the entire trip we made was punctuated by Cherri’s disappearance.

We did stop at Deer Lodge and call the Sheriff about what we found. I did rip-off a photo of her: a nice color photo of Cherri Halister, at a pool, in a blue bikini. She must have been around age 16 or 17. Nothing creepy. Just a captured moment in time, when she looked like a really young and budding Barbara Hershey.

When that suitcase was still in her family’s garage. When the light of life was just seeping a bit out of her young life. Barbara Hershey would have been jealous of Cherri. She looked like a star.

There are so many reasons why “they” don’t hire folks like “me.” Strike up the ageism and sexism band. I am 65, a male, and the jobs I am attempting to get are in the social services arena.

Educational navigator, state and county jobs, even city jobs. The writing is on the wall, in a rural county, and, when I do get interviews, it’s four to six women. Many times the interview is couched with “we are a tight-knit family, a very close team so how do you think you’d be part of that?”

I am a great interview, and I am able to put on a face, bring up interesting connections to my long work experience and my education to each respective job I’ve applied for.

And, that small knit female group is not wanting to have an outsider, someone who doesn’t look like them. These people, to be blunt, are seated inside a nanny mentality, and drawn into paperwork and following procedures to the letter. They are not giving and creative souls. They seem to be pretty one-dimensional. I get through the screening, then the interview, then the email a week or weeks later, which is a form letter, that states:

PAUL — Thank you for interviewing for the position of Permanency Workers (Social Services Specialist 1) Newport . Although you have not been selected for the position, we enjoyed learning about your background and experience in greater detail.

Again, thank you for your time and interest. We encourage you to apply for other opportunities in the future.

Thank you.”

Yep, my mother told me I should have continued at the U of Arizona and got the medical degree. Even a law degree. That was way back when, 19 years of age and having the gift of gab, the gift of testing to a high level, above 89 or 90. Gifts . . . now, at 65, feeling, well, embarassed that, a, I have to look for work with no retirement, in this shit hole country, and in any shit hole state (you name it). Democratic or Republican governor, the scum rises to the top. With so much scum below them. And, b, I am pissed off and in this predictament. And, c, that I even feel this way — useless, a throw-away, disposable, nothing (I don’t feel these for many minutes in a day, but still, feeling this shit is like hot lead down one’s gullet).

All terrible people lifted through the prostitution called politics. There are so many mean, dog-eat-dog, I-got-mine-tough-you-don’t-got-yours fucking Americanos. Yankee or Stars and Bars, most are cut from the same shit-hole Mayflower cloth.

This is the shape of things to come, for many of us, who are self-avowed radicals, willing to say and write and publish things that are definitely outside the bold lines of the center fold of American meanness. American group think. American belonging in the bandwagon. Infantalized. Disneyfied. Now, gGet stuck in a rural arena, with few opportunities, and this is the weekly routine —

• change up the resume
• write a new cover letter
• do an on-line application
• sometimes complete these timed tests, many of which are psycho personality tests — sick stuff
• attest at the end of the application, before hitting submit, that all stuff is truthful, and that they, the prospective employer, has the right to go back into all manner of work and legal and living history

And it is almost impossible during this process, and while consuming corporate, commercial, un-News news, to not get jaded, cynical, pissed off and, well, dejected. Since all the stories are about the beautiful people, the celebrities, all the crap around stars and sports stars. All the felonies committed by politicians, corporate heads, even those in positions of state-county-city government.

There are so many undeserving folk. Yep, we know that. And to hear any manner of these people who get quoted or get the limelight is to hear monsters who have zero idea how the 80 percent live.

Then, to see folks circling their wagons interviewing me only because they may be checking off — “get a white old male in the mix to look like we are diversity mavens” — to have at least three people in the pool. I have had my application stopped because not enought applicants hit the pool. Imagine that.

Then, there’s this blasphemy — more and more staffing firms, the bane of humanity:

Contracting is Worker Exploitation — (source)

Staffing agencies perpetuate this ugly cycle because they make a hefty profit exploiting contractors. Staffing agency recruiters will lie about the length of the contract and specific requirements, they’ll alter resumes without your knowledge, and make little to no effort to find another assignment once a contract ends. Some of these staffing agencies are so unprofessional, they’ve sent me emails meant for other people they’re trying to recruit. Staffing agencies are the worst. They don’t disclose how much they charge a company for a contractor’s services to maximize their profits. For example, for one of my recent contracting gigs, the company paid the staffing agency $60 an hour. I received $40 an hour while the staffing agency received $20 an hour for every hour of my work. The staffing agency received $800 a week for doing practically nothing, while I did all the work. These are the risks of contracting work, but it doesn’t make it right or ethical.

Here, in my neck of the woods, the Lincoln County School District, again, sell outs and they give shit about workers: “ESS is a staffing firm specializing in placing highly qualified staff in daily, long-term, and permanent K-12 school district positions, including paraprofessionals, substitute teachers, and other support staff. The company innovates education staffing to provide dynamic solutions to schools and professional opportunities to passionate educators. ESS provides its employees with the ability to work for schools across the country and competitive training, flexible work schedules, and professional development. The company’s partner schools receive personalized solutions, hands-on management, technology, and program reporting and analytics. ESS was founded in 2000, and its headquarter is located in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, United States. The firm’s expert professionals serve more than 3 million students with a pool of 60000 substitute and permanent employees throughout the United States. ESS provides healthcare benefits and other perks to its employees.”

So these schools, public schools, have sold out their food to profiteers (Sodexo), the janitorial profiteers (Sodexo; Bon Apetite), buses (Student First, et al) and their hiring too, sold out to the profit gougers. Staffing firms and those all-American welfare cheats who look, sound, smell like, well, good people. This is what the average person has to confront.

A national labor phenomenon known as “The Great Resignation,” or “The Big Quit,” began to take hold in January 2021 and has since grown. Millions of workers in the United States have turned the turmoil caused by the coronavirus pandemic into opportunities to rethink their professions and reframe their lives.

The trend is especially pronounced in the accommodation and food services sector, which experienced more than 5 percent worker attrition each month from June to October of last year.

Online, people flooded a Reddit forum called “r/antiwork” for commiseration and solidarity; by year’s end, the page had reached 1.5 million members. In the streets, thousands of unionized workers in manufacturing, health care, and higher education went on strike last fall for fair pay and protections. (source)

So, with two master’s degrees, and three dozen years teaching, and some of that including substituting K12 in Washington and Texas, I have to face jobs where $14.89 an hour, no benefits, on-call, at will, are the options. But add to this paltry pay: a substitute needs to pay a fee to get a substitute certification, which is $350 in Oregon. I even had to take a civics test, here in Oregon, a test that was so fucking easy that, well, another fee to pay in order to get a shitty $14.89 an hour.

You will not hear VP Harris or Jill Biden or Henry Giroux or Chris Hedges writing about this stuff. Believe you me, this is below them, to be blunt. I am part of a legion of older folk caught in several levels or circles of THEIR hell: the arbitrators, the people in high and mid office, making some of the worst decisions ever. We are at the whim of lock-step fearful folk. We are at the beckon call of the most uncreative people on earth. I have seen the antithesis of education, of journalism, of social work, of college teaching in my many decades wandering the planet as a writer who should have gone the route of med school or law.

I’m sixty-five and really part of the growing throw-away contingent of millions in this Western Culture who are just the flesh and blood (and data mines) in a pipeline for more rich and super rich and almost rich people to take their pound of flesh — fees, penalties, late charges, triple taxation, tickets, surcharges, foreclosures, evictions, repossessions, evictions, code infractions, add-ons.

Oh, cry for me, United Snakes of America. Evictions, uh? They — the landlords, the BlackRocks, the BlackStones, the Banks and the Insurance and the Real Estate monsters, they are the Stinkin’ Badges!

Never forget who we are:

But then, forgetting is in the water:

And, you can’t get Whoopied when you got no millions:

Unemployment, on the dole, on the fiddle, under the table, riff-raff, deplorable, welfare king, trash,undesirable,vermin, dreg of society, scum, outcast. Hell, just look at the Chosen People’s movie channels — all those narratives, those Hulu and Netflix and Amazon junk, how they depict (they never really depict real struggle) us commoners, those of us who still have a few good years left to be “contributors,” but for many reasons, will never get the third, fourth, tenth chance.

Remote Area Medical? Shit, we are an underperforming country, intentional, vis-a-vis the corporate whores, the lot of them:

Scale this shit up. Dental clinics, care homes, medical clinics. Free, of course. Reroute that Biden-Trump-Bush-Obama-Clinton war money to what we need: Stan Brock, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom: “A debate over healthcare has been raging nationwide, but what’s been lost in the discussion are the American citizens who live day after day, year after year without solutions for their most basic needs. Remote Area Medical documents the annual three-day “pop-up” medical clinic organized by the non-profit Remote Area Medical (RAM) in Bristol, Tennessee’s NASCAR speedway. Instead of a film about policy, Remote Area Medical is a film about people, about a proud Appalachian community banding together to try and provide some relief for friends and neighbors who are simply out of options.”

Fucking Stan Brock — they don’t make people like him anymore!

I have people worried that as white writers they will be hit with “cultural appropriation” if they write a novel with characters who are not of their own race. You know the deal — writing about barrios, or ghettos or even a mix of people in a big city, people outside the lilly white background of the author.

We know that is balderdash, to put it lightly. The cultural appropriation fear came up in a memoir writing class I teach. Memoirs, which are about people remembering a time in their lives, with significance, tied to themes, they are about the person, and then, through their looking glass and through deep analysis, about how they experience the world. A memoir is what the person, the author, is remembering. So, for instance, I grew up all over the place, but say, when I was three or four, we were in the Azores. Of course I have a right to write about my Portuguese “nanny” (babysitter). Or anything I learn/learned about Portugal.

Wrestling with my Mexican-American friends in high school in Tucson? Doing a sweat with my Apache friends up on the White River Apache Reservation? All the time I was in Central America, or in Mexico? These are off limits to me because I am Irish-German? Bull-shit!

The issue was brouched by a student who was watching that Uncle Tom, Oprah, who had on her show the author of American Dirt. She wrote a novel about — Mexicans coming across the border. She’s white, and she got all the hype, a seven-figure advance, and she said her husband, too, was an undocumented immigrant, but the problem is that fellow is Irish. Lots and lots of hype, publicity, and $$. She was even a headliner for an annual Spokane literary festival, Get Lit, set for April 2020. I was also going to be there as small potatoes writer reading, but both she was cancelled, through her agent and publisher, and the event got hit with the Covid paranoia.

There’s no use in getting into the debate about how she may have done some “brown facing,” or the fact that minority and marginalized and BIPOC writers in the USA get short shafted when it comes to literary notice, literary contracts, big promo’s and the big bucks. I explained to my students that to have a panel of people who have studied cultural appropriration, who know the ins and outs of the bizarre debate about teaching history about blacks, women, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and such, and how they can debunk these anti-“critical race theory” racists, to have them there, talking, and then giving the students a chance to query and discuss, that is the only way to deal with the actual issue of cultural appropriation.

Here, the background:

Oprah Winfrey will soon host a conversation about “American Dirt,” a novel mired in controversy that’s also the latest selection for her book club.

It’s too little too late. Winfrey should rescind her support now.

In nearly 25 years, only once has the entertainment mogul yanked a coveted book club endorsement. That came in 2006, after James Frey’s memoir about his addiction and recovery, “A Million Little Pieces,” turned out to be far more fiction than fact.

“American Dirt” needs to be the second.

For months, Jeanine Cummins’s novel about a Mexican mother and her young son heading to the border to escape a drug cartel has been widely criticized in Latinx circles for perpetuating what writer and translator David Bowles calls a “pastiche of stereotypes and melodramatic tropes of the sort one might expect from an author who did not grow up within Mexican culture.”

Cummins has long identified as white. In interviews, she now mentions her Puerto Rican grandmother, and some headlines call her “a white Latina.” She says she deeply researched the book, including spending time in Mexico.

Yet this isn’t about how Cummins self-identifies. It’s about a novel fostering stereotypes, and what happens when communities of color get shut out from telling their own stories.

After a publishing industry bidding war, Cummins received a seven-figure advance, and the movie rights have been sold. Her novel received glowing blurbs from Stephen King and John Grisham. She got a major credibility boost from acclaimed Latinx authors Sandra Cisneros, who called the book “masterful,” and Julia Alvarez, who said it’s “a dazzling accomplishment.” All appear on the book’s back cover.

In the ensuing debate, neither Cisneros nor Alvarez have stepped forward to defend a book to which they lent their names and, especially, their reputations. —  Renée Graham Globe Columnist,Updated January 28, 2020

I get where this entire thing comes down to (bad writing, white woman with no real ground-living/ground-truthing). And without shooting myself in the foot, me being a white guy who happens to know where I have been, for whom the people I have been with, what those close relationships I have fostered — with people way outside my demographic — have taught me about them and myself. I get how I stick out like a sore thumb when dealing with academic types, with university types, with those in MFA writing programs. I have been cancelled and delegitimzed my entire life. My stories and my characters in stories are my characters. Having to tell me that I have only the right to write about my own people and gender (heterosexual white as is my family/blood) is absurd. But I get the reactions to this white priviledge in publishing, but I also hate what the MFA Writing Programs have done to writers and writing the past 30 years. I hate the barbaric thinking on both side of this debate. And Oprah? I am an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, and I wonder what Malcolm X might think of the current affairs of this rot-gut country? Billionaire? Oprah? The make or break literary arbiter?

The fact is just two days ago, we get the Oregon news around the education outcomes of Black students in Multnomah County.

Part of why Portland’s Black and Latino students are so vastly underrepresented in advanced courses, parents of color say, is that many teachers, counselors and other educators assume those students aren’t smart or skilled enough to handle the challenge.

Low expectations and a lack of structural support for Black and Latino students also continue to lead to persistently low graduation and college-going rates for those groups, an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive has found.

That is true even though the district’s top leaders pledged nearly 2 ½ years ago that they would dramatically boost Black and Latino student achievement by this year.

Despite making up about 7% of the overall student population, Black students represent about 1% of those who took advanced courses this school year and last, district figures show.

And even though Latinos make up about 16% or 17% of district enrollment, they represent about 8% of those taking advanced courses. (“Left Behind: Low expectations, lackluster education for high school students of color in Portland span decades” — Oregonian)\

This is 2022, not 1964 when Malcolm X did his The Ballot or the Bullet speech.

I am not embarassed or ashamed of the white crackers in this country, whether they are dirt poor crackers or rich as kings crackers. Racists, sexists, ageists, they all are a bunch of privileged fools. But they hate. Most people I know of never ever go into a cracker bar with a bunch of Harleys outside. I do. And the shit coming out of these people’s racist mouths is consistent with their country’s history of killing and killing. So embarassed? Why? These people are the nature outgrowth of who they are, where they came from and how they have developed. Bad-bad folks. Yes, there are deplorables, just not the way that white racist Hillary was thinking about!

Just two days ago:

A Kansas principal was allegedly forced to apologize to high school staff after showing them a video about white privilege, KMUW reports.

The incident started in January when Principal Tim Hamblin reportedly showed Derby High School staff a 2011 video focused on the perspectives of Dr. Joy DeGruy. DeGruy, who is a Black author, spoke about her personal experiences with racism and white privilege.

The story was about her being forced to present identification to a grocery store cashier, while her sister-in-law, who has a fair complexion, did not have to do such a thing. The relative ended up calling out the store manager and staff for racism.

“She used her white privilege to educate and make right a situation that was wrong,” DeGruy says in the footage. “That’s what you can do every single day.” (source)

I’ve been in meetings and conferences with DeGruy. An amazing person. Is it just Kansas? The putz apologizes? This is one sick country — and the sickness is deep:

What would Malcolm X think or say? About this shit in this day and age?

What would Malcolm X think about this government overreach, the Klanadians, and who they are, as compared to who the Americans are?

Kanyenkehaka (Mohawk) is from the Tehanakarineh family of the Bear Clan. His home is in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, but he currently resides at the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory (near Hamilton, Ontario). He is an Onkwehon:we (Indigenous) man and belongs to the Kayenkehaka Nation, not the Canadian or English nation. His people have kept their ways and traditions, and despite generations of mistreatment at the hands of the Canadian government, they remain a separate, allied Nation with their own rights and responsibilities to creation.

“For all of you who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, maybe you’re new to this country. They didn’t teach you that Indigenous people own these lands. They’ll tell you that it’s theirs. It’s Canada’s wonderful free place. It was only free because they stole things. I’m talking to all the brown people in the cities that didn’t want to go and support the truckers because they thought they were racist. Well, the Liberal Government’s racist and so is the Conservative Government. The entire government of Canada is racist. And the RCMP are racist. Let’s face the facts the RCMP are just as much a culprit in the in the theft of the indigenous children that got sent to residential schools, because they were the collectors.”

Here, the Latinx calling out “American Dirt”: Myriam Gurba,

Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature

When I tell gringos that my Mexican grandfather worked as a publicist, the news silences them.

Shocked facial expressions follow suit.

Their heads look ready to explode and I can tell they’re thinking, “In Mexico, there are PUBLICISTS?!”

I wryly grin at these fulanos and let my smile speak on my behalf. It answers, “Yes, bitch, in México, there are things to publicize such as our own fucking opinions about YOU.”

I follow in the cocky footsteps of my grandfather, Ricardo Serrano Ríos, “decano de los publicistas de Jalisco[1],” and not only do I have opinions, I bark them como itzcuintli. También soy chismosa and if you don’t have the gift of Spanglish, allow me to translate. “Chisme” means gossip. It’s my preferred art form, one I began practicing soon after my period first stained my calzones, and what’s literature, and literary criticism, if not painstakingly aestheticized chisme?

Tengo chisme. Are you ready?

A self-professed gabacha, Jeanine Cummins, wrote a book that sucks. Big time.

Her obra de caca belongs to the great American tradition of doing the following:

1. Appropriating genius works by people of color
2. Slapping a coat of mayonesa on them to make palatable to taste buds estados-unidenses and
3. Repackaging them for mass racially “colorblind” consumption.

Rather than look us in the eye, many gabachos prefer to look down their noses at us. Rather than face that we are their moral and intellectual equals, they happily pity us. Pity is what inspires their sweet tooth for Mexican pain, a craving many of them hide. This denial motivates their spending habits, resulting in a preference for trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf. To satisfy this demand, Cummins tossed together American Dirt, a “road thriller” that wears an I’m-giving-a-voice-to-the-voiceless-masses merkin.

I learned about Dirt when an editor at a feminist magazine invited me to review it.

I accepted her offer, Dirt arrived in my mailbox, and I tossed it in my suitcase. At my tía’s house in Guadalajara, I opened the book.

Before giving me a chance to turn to chapter one, a publisher’s letter made me wince.

“The first time Jeanine and I ever talked on the phone,” the publisher gushed, “she said migrants at the Mexican border were being portrayed as a ‘faceless brown mass.’ She said she wanted to give these people a face.”

The phrase “these people” pissed me off so bad my blood became carbonated.

I looked up, at a mirror hanging on my tía’s wall.

It reflected my face.

In order to choke down Dirt, I developed a survival strategy. It required that I give myself over to the project of zealously hate-reading the book, filling its margins with phrases like “Pendeja, please.” That’s a Spanglish analogue for “Bitch, please.”

Back in Alta California, I sat at my kitchen table and penned my review. I submitted it. Waited.

After a few days, an editor responded. She wrote that though my takedown of Dirt was “spectacular,” I lacked the fame to pen something so “negative.” She offered to reconsider if I changed my wording, if I wrote “something redeeming.”

In the end, though, it’s Black History Month. Anyone with any worth should listen to Malcolm X’s talk, The Ballot or the Bullet. Goddamn it, listen.

I’m not a politician, not even a student of politics; in fact, I’m not a student of much of anything. I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican, and I don’t even consider myself an American. If you and I were Americans, there’d be no problem. Those Honkies that just got off the boat, they’re already Americans; Polacks are already Americans; the Italian refugees are already Americans. Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren’t Americans yet.

Well, I am one who doesn’t believe in deluding myself. I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate. Being here in America doesn’t make you an American. Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American. Why, if birth made you American, you wouldn’t need any legislation; you wouldn’t need any amendments to the Constitution; you wouldn’t be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington, D.C., right now. They don’t have to pass civil-rights legislation to make a Polack an American.

No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver — no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.

These 22 million victims are waking up. Their eyes are coming open. They’re beginning to see what they used to only look at. They’re becoming politically mature. They are realizing that there are new political trends from coast to coast. As they see these new political trends, it’s possible for them to see that every time there’s an election the races are so close that they have to have a recount. They had to recount in Massachusetts to see who was going to be governor, it was so close. It was the same way in Rhode Island, in Minnesota, and in many other parts of the country. And the same with Kennedy and Nixon when they ran for president. It was so close they had to count all over again. Well, what does this mean? It means that when white people are evenly divided, and black people have a bloc of votes of their own, it is left up to them to determine who’s going to sit in the White House and who’s going to be in the dog house. (transcript here)

Ahh, some Mexican writers have called this latest book on today’s Mexico, one of the best. Written by, well, Theroux, the old white guy!

Theroux then goes deep into the hinterland, on the back roads of Chiapas and Oaxaca, to uncover the rich, layered world behind today’s brutal headlines.

He meets with the legendary Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista movement dedicated to defending the rights of Mexico’s indigenous people. ON THE PLAIN OF SNAKES: A Mexican Journey is replete with adventures, history, discursions on literature about Mexico, stunning descriptions and, running through it all, a deep humanity and respect for the ordinary Mexicans who are his main subject.

Paul Theroux has been called “The world’s most perceptive travel writer”. He is the author of many highly acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Great Railway Bazaar, The Mosquito Coast and Riding the Iron Rooster. We spoke with him last about his book Deep South.

Interview here of Paul Theroux: Source/Podcast.

What would Malcolm X say?

So, what I’m trying to impress upon you, in essence, is this: You and I in America are faced not with a segregationist conspiracy, we’re faced with a government conspiracy. Everyone who’s filibustering is a senator — that’s the government. Everyone who’s finagling in Washington, D.C., is a congressman — that’s the government. You don’t have anybody putting blocks in your path but people who are a part of the government. The same government that you go abroad to fight for and die for is the government that is in a conspiracy to deprive you of your voting rights, deprive you of your economic opportunities, deprive you of decent housing, deprive you of decent education. You don’t need to go to the employer alone, it is the government itself, the government of America, that is responsible for the oppression and exploitation and degradation of black people in this country. And you should drop it in their lap. This government has failed the Negro. This so-called democracy has failed the Negro. And all these white liberals have definitely failed the Negro.

“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” ― Smedley Butler, War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier

There are thousands of examples daily in the mainstream and left-stream and right-stream media showing how broken and corrupt this system — capitalism — is.

I’ll look, then, at the war machines, the ugly thieving corporations that suck the life out of our communities, that sag all community safety nets, that kill universal health care, universal dental care, universal housing.

The military, and, yep, BlackRock, and all the other financial murderers.

Anything and everything associated with the military is, well, right smack in the cricle of hell —

Here are the circles of hell in order of entrance and severity:

1. Limbo: Where those who never knew Christ exist. Dante encounters ​Ovid, Homer, Socrates, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, and more here.
2. Lust: Self-explanatory. Dante encounters Achilles, Paris, Tristan, Cleopatra, and Dido, among others.
3. Gluttony: Where those who overindulge exist. Dante encounters ordinary people here, not characters from epic poems or gods from mythology. The author Boccaccio took one of these characters, Ciacco, and incorporated him into his 14th-century collection of tales called “The Decameron.”
4. Greed: Self-explanatory. Dante encounters more ordinary people but also the guardian of the circle, Pluto, the mythological king of the Underworld. This circle is reserved for people who hoarded or squandered their money, but Dante and Virgil do not directly interact with any of its inhabitants. This is the first time they pass through a circle without speaking to anyone, a commentary on Dante’s opinion of greed as a higher sin.
5. Anger: Dante and Virgil are threatened by the Furies when they try to enter through the walls of Dis (Satan). This is a further progression in Dante’s evaluation of the nature of sin; he also begins to question himself and his own life, realizing his actions and nature could lead him to this permanent torture. 
6. Heresy: Rejection of religious and/or political “norms.” Dante encounters Farinata degli Uberti, a military leader and aristocrat who tried to win the Italian throne and was convicted posthumously of heresy in 1283. Dante also meets Epicurus, Pope Anastasius II, and Emperor Frederick II.
7. Violence: This is the first circle to be further segmented into sub-circles or rings. There are three of them—the Outer, Middle, and Inner rings—housing different types of violent criminals. The first are those who were violent against people and property, such as Attila the Hun. Centaurs guard this Outer Ring and shoot its inhabitants with arrows. The Middle Ring consists of those who commit violence against themselves (suicide). These sinners are perpetually eaten by Harpies. The Inner Ring is made up of the blasphemers, or those who are violent against God and nature. One of these sinners is Brunetto Latini, a sodomite, who was Dante’s own mentor. (Dante speaks kindly to him.) The usurers are also here, as are those who blasphemed not just against God but also the gods, such as Capaneus, who blasphemed against Zeus.
8. Fraud: This circle is distinguished from its predecessors by being made up of those who consciously and willingly commit fraud. Within the eighth circle is another called the Malebolge (“Evil Pockets”), which houses 10 separate bolgias (“ditches”). In these exist types of those who commit fraud: panderers/seducers; flatterers; simoniacs (those who sell ecclesiastical preferment); sorcerers/astrologers/false prophets; barrators (corrupt politicians); hypocrites; thieves; false counselors/advisers; schismatics (those who separate religions to form new ones); and alchemists/counterfeiters, perjurers, impersonators, etc. Each bolgia is guarded by different demons, and the inhabitants suffer different punishments, such as the simoniacs, who stand head-first in stone bowls and endure flames upon their feet.
9. Treachery: The deepest circle of Hell, where Satan resides. As with the last two circles, this one is further divided, into four rounds. The first is Caina, named after the biblical Cain, who murdered his brother. This round is for traitors to family. The second, Antenora—from Antenor of Troy, who betrayed the Greeks—is reserved for political/national traitors. The third is Ptolomaea for Ptolemy, son of Abubus, who is known for inviting Simon Maccabaeus and his sons to dinner and then murdering them. This round is for hosts who betray their guests; they are punished more harshly because of the belief that having guests means entering into a voluntary relationship, and betraying a relationship willingly entered is more despicable than betraying a relationship born into. The fourth round is Judecca, after Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ. This round is reserved for traitors to their lords/benefactors/masters. As in the previous circle, the subdivisions each have their own demons and punishments.

Here we go, though, daily, the sickness of this country, Biden, Trump, the entire capitalist shithole:

And, so, this is news, that never ever gets criticized by mainstream media, by the thugs in the Press, by all of the pukes that are Americans. War, toys, billions of taxpayer money for this shit:

OPV – the future? Sikorsky and DARPA think so

What does OPV stand for? Optionally-Piloted Vehicle. Sikorsky and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) have been working on a remotely controlled Sikorsky Black Hawk, aptly registered N60-0PV (former UH-60A 79-23298 of the US Army, with msn 70115).

Together with Lockheed Martin they used DARPA’s ALIAS (Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System) programme for a test flight, which took place at Fort Campbell AAF (KY), on 5 February.

Sitting on the runway, one of Sikorsky’s pilots flips the optionally piloted cockpit switch from two to zero, exits the aircraft and walks across the runway.

Not long after, on a clear cold morning, the Black Hawk, with DARPA’s logo, completes a pre-flight check list, starts its engines, spins up its rotors and takes off with no crew onboard. The test flight will take thirty minutes to complete.

Then, of course, the USA and bioweapons, poison weapons, toxins, sound blasts, plasma, etc. How many soldiers have I talked to who were forced to take anti-malarial drugs, vaccinations for sand fleas, anthrax, Gulf War Syndrome, etc. How many experiments do we have in this society? This is the reality of the freak show of USA.

The U.S.’s chemical and biological weapons programs were outgrowths of a Cold War mentality that pursued hegemony at all costs. This was in keeping with the history of the United States as a capitalist society founded upon slavery, exploitation and, war. While these programs were supposedly phased out decades ago, the COVID-19 pandemic has raised new questions about the character of biological and chemical warfare. Claims of a “lab leak” theory that suggest China leaked COVID-19 from its Wuhan Institute of Virology have been thoroughly debunked  and met with concerns about the continued operation of Fort Detrick in Maryland, the epicenter of the U.S.’s biological weapons program. Fort Detrick has been linked to the experimentation of pathogens such as Ebola and Anthrax. (Black Agenda Report)

Then of course, the war lords, the felons, the liars, the polilticians, the media, the entire left-right pukes cruising to have a war with Russia? Now, let’s see, which country murdered millions? Which Germany murdered boys and men in Greece and destroyed villages? Hmm, Germany? That one, or the DNA in the Germans? And what did Cuba do to USA, how many invasions, how many countries did Cuba use to set up murder incorporated?

“Do You Want a War Between Russia and NATO?”

After a strenuous six hours of discussions Putin, predictably, monopolized the eminently quotable department, starting with one that will be reverberating all across the Global South for a long time: “Citizens of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia have seen how peaceful is NATO.”

There’s more. The already iconic  Do you want a war between Russia and NATO? – followed by the ominous  “there will be no winners”. Or take this one, on Maidan: “Since February 2014, Russia has considered a coup d’état to be the source of power in Ukraine. This is a bad sandbox, we don’t like this kind of game.”

On the Minsk agreements, the message was blunt: “The President of Ukraine has said that he does not like any of the clauses of the Minsk agreements. Like it, or not – be patient, my beauty. They must be fulfilled.” (Pepe Escobar)

The entire premise of war lords, the USA, the UK, the EU, NATO, well, this is it:

Harrowing Drone-Strike Testimony at US Senate/ February 10, 2022/

 ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi came under fire from Sen. Lindsey Graham, while the chair of a Yemeni group offered graphic testimony of airstrikes’ human costs.

The first to do so was Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, who said that former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama “started using drones strikes in Yemen without Congress or the American public ever even having a conversation about it.”

“Successive presidents have unilaterally claimed the power to use secretive war-based rules to kill terrorism suspects in multiple other countries around the world where we were not, or are not, at war,” Shamsi continued. “Despite widespread, credible reports of terrible civilian deaths and injuries, and lacking any strategic assessment of costs and consequences, or an end goal, the executive branch has kept expanding this program geographically, and in the categories of groups and people who could be killed based only on a president’s say-so.”

“The legal justifications are vague and ever-shifting, and virtually no other country agrees with them,” she added. “If any other country launched this program, we would rightly call it an unlawful, extrajudicial, and arbitrary use of force. Yet it is a core component of what Americans now call our forever or endless wars.” (Consortium News)

How many levels or circles of that Hell are we now constructing?

This is it, the lords of finance are the lords of war are the lords of AI are the lords of transhumanism are the lords of digital dungeons for us common folk.

Enough already. Enjoy your Friday, Big Mac’s and all.

I’m writing this as a reaction to the aftermath of a friendship — shortlived, at one month — extinguished over, well, socialism. An arugment over socialism and Jesus. Questions around what to do with the homeless. Or how to treat and deal with those rough sleepers as well as those homeless in a van and those about to be without a steady home?

I have not taken a vow of poverty, per se. In the end, I am a selfish writer, who just happened to be a selflish writer, teacher, actvisit and social worker over decades. I never wanted to have to wake up in the middle of the night worried about the law, about the IRS, about where the rent would be coming. I have had those feelings, and maybe even now, some of those feelings are certainly laughable compared to what people hitting the high seas wake up to, as they attempt to make it to UK or France, Italy or Greece, or other places, like the USA.

Just today:

“The U.S. Coast Guard has suspended its search for dozens of migrants who are feared dead after their boat capsized off the coast of Florida Saturday. Five bodies have been found, while 34 people are still missing. One survivor was rescued earlier this week as he clung to the hull of the sinking boat, which had departed from the Bahamas.”

So, this fellow I have been involved with in a sort of fellowship, well, I guess I pushed him over the edge. I talked about what we can do to assist the homeless, and of course, that is part and parcel, what can we do to be mindful of us all.

I was riffing with the front page news here:

Newport officials’ hands are largely tied when it comes to problematic camping. A federal circuit court ruling that found criminalizing camping on public property, if other options are not available, violates the Eighth Amendment and a pair of bills passed by the state legislature effectively nullified many current provisions in Newport’s city code.

The Newport City Council is now working toward passing a new, compliant ordinance.

Employees at a Bayfront restaurant have lodged multiple complaints about an encampment on nearby public land, saying an occupant was stealing trash cans and creating a health hazard. There were two tarp tents next to the business, one in an adjacent grassy area and one in the parking lot. The latter was cleared, and the city posted a notice of nuisance littering on the former, advising that the site would be cleaned Jan. 25 (it had not been as of Jan. 26).

I was not pushing the idea that these sorts of encampments are great, that the neighbors should be happy about them. The question is, “What can we do about it, about them?”

I live in a tourist community, one with great struggle, and the housing issue is huge. Yet, there are big homes, vacation homes, where people come for a month or two out of the year. There are huge gaps between those who have and those who do not. Then there are aging people with equity in their homes, and well, social security, and, hanging on. But there are so many older white people in this community who just are bitter. They pick one side of the messed up political theater, and then go for it. Pro-Trump this, Love Biden that. Bottom line, though, most are very very pro-pro capitalists, beyond sanity.

I confronted this Jesus-quoting friend with the idea that we need in Lincoln County more social services, more communty-based services, more ways to help even the most messed up, possiblly drunkest and drugged out dudes living on the streets, defecating in parking lots, and vandalizing. Am I for that? Nope. But this End Times friend went on and on how he knew some fellow in California who had more money in his bank account just by panhandling and scamming, who came off as homeless, even though this fellow had some flop from which he was renting and living.

Of course, the End Times fellow made the grand leap of, “there are plenty of people like that.”

Well, scammers and daylight thieves, of course there are countless ones in USA, and elsewhere. THIEVES of Capitalism. Millions. The One Percent, and their Eichmann’s. Even government bureaucrats. The biggest scam and rip off is perpetrated by the rich. From the car manufacturers, to the car salesmen, to the oil companies, the road builders. Until we live in a world where public transportation doesn’t work, or is for, perception all massaged by Mad Men, loosers. And, there are no army of real homeless scammers who panhandle by day, and live in luxury at night. They . . . do . . . not . . . exist . . . in . . . any . . . significant . . . numbers.

There are so many homeless, or those labeled “housing insecure,” that the true picture of how bad off we are now and going into the future, here, in USA, and then elsewhere, that would blow people away, if the mainstream media were to do the real job of journalism. Millions and millions, who are struggling. Many have been beaten down early by rapist fathers, drugging mothers, absolute horrific conditions. Cops, criminals, crass capitalism, exploitation, and just not enough love and no aunts and uncles doing the old magic of “it takes a village.” Many were born with cognitive issues tied to the bad gestation and epigenetics. Then, there goes reading and comprehension. Early, grade 1, and then things start slipping. Many are born with a hundred strikes against them. Beautiful children, Hallmark version children. But they are on a pathway to addiction, to dropping out, to not having the persistence to learn. The dream hoarders are not coming to the rescue, because, like my friend, taxation (what a poor thing, in capitalism, taxing to pay for war and to spend on the rich’s projects) is a dirty word.

Even this fellow, not a socialist, not one of the poor, and here we are, Brookings Institute. Not that I am a big fan of the rich and the elite and scholars talking about this issue or many hundreds without the real people who are the subjects of their work, at the table. Gee, the poor:

Capitalism does that — it eats the weak, poor, vulnerable. Capitalism makes money on the poor, on the masses, on those in precarity, now, in lockdown, and before.

But this fellow was mad, because I am not a believer, which he first liked about me before today’s conversation. Today, I had to say, we have to do big things to solve big issues, and that homeless rough sleepers, miscreants, even guys and gals who are petty criminals, dirt producing humanity, we have to do something. And having ordinances to remove them is not the answer.

The problem is that some people who believe in the tenets of Christ, or what have you, who do not like the temples or the churches, who see hypocrits everywhere in all the denominations, well, I agree with them. But I also know that believing that the climate crisis was foretold in the Old Testament, or that we are headed to a one world communist government, as foretold in the Bible, and that the wrath of God shall make today’s virus pandemic and floods and wildfires look like walks in the park, well, the issue for me is that, it is their Bible Born Belief System, but BBBS is, again, not transferable to some of us who believe life on earth is hell for many, but we have to do the work of, even if it is Sysiphis, attempting to solve the problems.

Yes, the cards have always been stacked against us. The issue is that Bible Thumpers, and those who want only the simple written down words of Jesus Christ and zero look at religions, and even great thinkers like MLK, Jr., or the Berrigans, or Tutu or Thick Nhat Hanh, they are disregarded by BBBS folk because the simple message of their Christ is that this life is nothing, and that there will be a New Jerusalem, a reckoning, and that this worldly life is just a step toward a new world, a forever world, one of purity. (source)

And so, while he knows I am not a religious person, not a god believer, or god follower, he said he liked my fellowship. It was just that I called him on the homeless scammers bullshit, and that we have to come together as a society to systemically work on all of the frayed safety nets. And I stated, that socialism — not Leninism, not Russian Soviet Unionism, or Chinese communism — is the only way forward. And he got made, stated that he worked 12 hour days, seven days a week, for years, selling cars, even telling me he missed out on spending time with his growing daughter, that he does not feel all that work means he has to give up all his stuff and live on the streets with the rest of them. That is what many think socialism is.

Even those like this fellow who professes he doesn’t consume the news, and tells me he and his wife have an agreement NOT to talk politics or religion, since she is a Marxist and not an End Times BBBS-er. Again, he was in California for years, around cars salesmen, around golfers, around rightwingers, who to this day would think his version of Christ and the next world is silly.

I was told, “Jesus wasn’t against making money. He was against those who used money certain ways.”

Again, what hedge fund would Jesus invest in? Which Pharma company wouldJesus invest in? Which company, Cargil or Bayer crop would Jesus invest in? Which water-sucking, pesiticide-loving golf course would Jesus golf on?

Would Jesus (not that I agree that he actually existed) be a socialist?

In Rendering Unto Caesar, Lawrence Reed, president emeritus of the libertarian-leaning Foundation for Economic Education, writes that Jesus was not a socialist in that he promoted voluntary giving and charity rather than the mandatory taking by government (taxes).

That is it, now, is it not? My friend decries the mega-churches, all the fancy trappings of pastors and priests, but he believes Jesus would be fine with multimillionaires and billionaires. So, you get the bucks doing this or that bad bad thing, but you then can give up, through charity, with voluntary giving, some of it for charity, and that’s fine. I disagree with that, but the problem is that anti-socialists have no concept of a world that is truly democratic, respectful of ecology, children, women, old and young, a world that is non-violent. These people who state they have no need for news, and hold the bible as their guide, well, they still are products of everything they reject. They are political, and they are sucked into their culture, their upbringings and their circumstances. I reminded him that social security is a type of socialism, but he states it is just something HE paid into, as if it was just a big bank accounty waiting for him.

I wish BBBS-ers would have discussions outside the very narrow frame of this Christ’s adages and sayings.

Here, “Father John Dear, longtime peace activist and former director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, recalls the lives and impact of his close friends Thich Nhat Hanh and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who corresponded with him regularly. Thich Nhat Hanh, the world-renowned Buddhist monk, antiwar activist, poet and teacher, died Saturday at the age of 95, and South African anti-apartheid icon Archbishop Tutu died last month at the age of 90. Dear is the former director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which first brought Thich Nhat Hanh to the United States in the 1960s, and is now executive director of the Beatitudes Center.” (source)

OK, we’ve lost two giants in this last month: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Thich Nhat Hanh. I was so blessed to know both of them. And now we have to step up to the plate. You know? I knew that they gave every single day of their lives for peace and justice and creation, fearlessly. And they believed they could do this even when they were young. We have to do the same thing, and, as Tutu said, keep at it ’til the day we die. We need people who are committed to building a global movement of nonviolence for justice, disarmament and creation, the likes of which the world has never seen, way beyond Tutu and Daniel Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh, to save the planet. As Dr. King said, it’s no longer violence or nonviolence; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. So, I hope people can take heart from these two great giants and step up to the plate and, you know, model peace and nonviolence in their personal lives and relationships, and go forward to build this movement to abolish war itself and racism and poverty and nuclear weapons and environmental destruction, and bring about a new culture of peace and nonviolence. That’s the best thing we can do to remember them.

John Dear is an amazing fellow, still alive, talking of the power of the Vietnamese monk who just died:

And I got to know him through Daniel Berrigan and being the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. It was FOR, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, that brought Thich Nhat Hanh to the United States in 1966 on a speaking tour. And it was the genius of this great hero, an unknown peacemaker friend of ours, John Heidbrink, who recognized in him the greatest voice of peace coming from Vietnam. It was brilliant. And part of the tour, Heidbrink said, “I need to take him to meet the three most important religious leaders in the United States — Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton and Daniel Berrigan,” who were all intimately involved with the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

So, he does that. He takes Thich Nhat Hanh to meet Dr. King. I think they met in Chicago. And Dr. King was floored. You can read it in his speeches with — about Thich Nhat Hanh and statements later saying he basically had never met anybody like Thich Nhat Hanh, such a gentle monk. And don’t be fooled by Thich Nhat Hanh, because he was a person of steel. He was so solid. He was so strong and firm. And King recognized that immediately. And it’s hard to unpack the impact that Thich Nhat Hanh had on the United States and in mobilizing not just everybody, but these great figures, to really speak out for an end to the War in Vietnam, beginning with Martin Luther King, who held a press conference with him that day. They later met in Geneva. And Martin Luther King nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, the only person Martin Luther King nominated for the Peace Prize. And they had breakfast together, and Thich Nhat Hanh said beautiful things to him. He said later that just being with Dr. King, not just the power of the great person’s rhetoric but in his ordinary humanity — he said, “Martin, you are a bodhisattva to the world,” which is an awakened Buddha. And no one had talked to Martin Luther King like that.

He had the same influence on Thomas Merton, who wrote an amazing statement, that “I am closer to” — this was in 1966. “I’m closer to Thich Nhat Hanh than most Americans, certainly most church people, including most of the monks in my monastery. Thich Nhat Hanh and I see things exactly the same way. Nhat Hanh is my brother.” Remember, he’s the enemy, Thich Nhat Hanh. We’re bombing and killing Vietnamese. And what people don’t know, and you heard it on the clip you played, but Thich Nhat Hanh knew 1,000 monks by name who were killed. Think about what that would do to you as a person, something that I always thought of when I was with him. — Father John Dear

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves (Matthew 21:12).

Well, which Bible quotes point to Jesus’ socialism? I don’t see any quotes pointing toward supporting monoplies, or oligarchies, military industrial complexes, or disaster capitalism. 6 Bible Quotes That Are Blatantly Socialist — Not that we need article after article on Jesus’ supposed modern day reflections, since he was in a very very different place, time and world, more than two thousand years ago.

Here’s the full story behind this quote, which describes a famous scene that’s depicted in the painting above.

In a temple in Jerusalem, Jesus’s disciples had gathered to celebrate Passover. Merchants and money changers in the temple offered some commercial services. They sold doves to be sacrificed and offered to exchange money into the currency needed to pay temple dues.

But they didn’t do so in a way that Jesus considered ethical. They cheated customers, charged prohibitive fees, prioritized profit over ethics, swindled believers, and exploited the poor.

(According to scholars, these temple merchants also colluded with the aristocracy to profit off of poor people’s poverty — they charged interest when lending money from the wealthy to poor people who were in severe debt, thereby making enormous profits.)

Jesus was incensed that these merchants had the gall to turn the temple into what he called a “den of thieves.”

So he expelled them from the temple and literally turned the tables.

This event is regarded by scholars as being the catalyst that triggered his crucifixion. It convinced his enemies that he was a rabble rouser — he presented the danger of inciting revolutionary sentiment among the poor, exploited masses.

The story illustrates that Jesus held radical (i.e., socialist) ideas about the inherent dissonance between commerce and spirituality, and the exploitative nature of profit-making endeavors, such as charging interest, which he viewed as a grave sin.

I understand my friend’s position here on the coast. I understand how he feels life on earth is nothing, that the real blessing is in one master, Jesus Christ. I understand this friend’s background, and the torments he’s had, and that he seems to have some peace around this belief system. But, then, how do people like me interact, someone who, if I take some of the stuff face value, out of the “bible,” as socialistic, and then the true believer hates the word itself, and hates Marxism, how do I navigate that?

IN a big burst of anger, my friend slammed a DVD onto a parking lot, a DVD he was giving to me to look at. He was made, and, well, he moved on, got in his car, and drove off. My words, “Well, we are so different. We come from two entirely different worlds,” those seem okay but yes, harsh for someone trying to find fellowship with me, a man of this world, one embedded into all things around me, and unfortunately, those things are all tied to politics. Even the beaches I hike on and the plastic waste, or the Coast Guard, or the dogs crapping on the wrack lines. Or the smell of the paper mill in Toledo making it 25 miles south to my town. Yep, but I can absorb beauty in the stuggle for life, my own sanity, life itself, even those dirty, defecating, neighborhood-disrupting souls out there. Making the news.

What to do about . . . . fill in the blank______________________________. And, then, imagine that guy, that “son of god,” what he might do.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5).

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more (Isaiah 2:4).

Jesus: To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back. And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them (Luke 6:27).

No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despite the other. You cannot serve both God and wealth (Matthew 6:24).

Jesus: I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:23).

And, yes, And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves (Matthew 21:12).

Liberation Theology in Latin America

Christian Socialism in which we talk about similarities and differences between the the teachings of Jesus and the ideals socialism espouses.

The Good News According to Matthew

The Plowshares Eight: Thirty Years On

Anti-war Christ

The Socialist Anti-War Tradition: Leading the Fight Against War and Imperialism

Dorothy Day’s granddaughter sentenced to prison for nuclear base break-in

The Sermon on the Mount: A Manifesto for Christian Anarchism

Charging Interest

The Challenge and Spirituality of Catholic Social Teaching

What Is the Meaning of “A Camel Going Through the Eye of a Needle”?

Thanks to, “Jesus would not approve of capitalism and our blind worship of billionaires” by Stephanie Leguichard

To reiterate: we are locked in the elite’s sick and perverted game of stealing from us all, and they defecate on us all, in countries, on farms, in towns and cities.

Let’s listen to Michael Hudson:

Michael Hudson: The Federal Reserve and Treasury painted the U.S. into a corner with its Quantitative Easing to save the banks and brokerage houses after 2008. The policy succeeded in supporting and even raising real estate prices, and providing arbitrage opportunities to borrow at low rates to buy higher-yielding stocks and bonds, vastly increasing the magnitude of financial wealth. This has been especially the case since the pandemic, creating an estimated trillion dollars in “capital gains” (including short term arbitrage) for the wealthiest One Percent.

What seemed to be the financial death trap was the prospect of rising interest rates ending the free lunch of interest-dividend arbitrage, and easy mortgage money. The threat was to reverse the asset-price run-up. We already are seeing that in recent weeks as stocks plunged to reflect the rise in Treasury bond rates.

But by now, 14 years after the Obama bailouts and QE rescue of insolvent banks, a new condition has emerged: a vast sum of private capital seeking to move out of the financial markets. Many of the most astute One Percent is taking their money and running – into private equity and real estate.

The result is that housing prices are soaring as private capital is out-bidding owner-occupant home buyers. While the latter face rising mortgage-interest rates, private capital finds the likelihood for both current rental income and capital gains to be a much better bet than the stock and bond market. The result will not be a decline in real estate prices, but a decline in home-ownership rates as a shift to rental housing occurs. The financial class is becoming the new absentee landlord class.

Lower stock prices will spur a similar private-capital wave of corporate takeovers, posturing as “rescuers” of the economy. The aim will be short-term asset stripping, of course (that is the business plan of private equity), but it will consolidate ownership in the hands of a financial elite. And to the extent that state and local budgets suffer from the downturn, sell-offs of public land and infrastructure also will transfer property and its rent-extracting opportunities into hands – not with borrowed credit but for all-cash, the cash that QE policy and tax favoritism has brought into being in the past 14 years.

So, to the extent that there are bankruptcies, this will have the usual result: consolidation and concentration of wealth ownership. The non-financial economy’s structure is being transformed – under the slogan of individualistic free markets.

For meat, eggs and other farm produce, the farmers are not receiving higher prices for their crops and produce. The middlemen are gouging out more fees for themselves, thanks to the monopoly position of Cargill et al.

We are on the brink of war because of Obama, Bush, Trump and Biden. Because of the elite. Because of neocons and neoliberals. Because of USA and Israel. Because of Zionists and Christian Zealots. Because of the Gilded Class. Because so many chosen people of the Ivy League, of the financial class, of the deep state look down on the 80 percent of the world (or maybe even some of themselves, part of the 99 Percent) look down on the world. So many of these elites, these leaders, are, in one sense, living out some awful end times themselves. But bringing it to us, in rapid fashion. They are not Jesus freaks, not lovers of Merton, never lovers of Day or Berrigan. They are the killers, the capitalists. And, yes, if you have an army, if you trade in the shekels of lords of war, if you are in it for the control, the space constellation of satellites, for the control of human agency, for gene editing and soul stealing, then, you are, I suppose, what Jesus, if he was a real guy, and if he was around, would be debating out in the open. Decrying. And, attacking.

But, here we are, discussing the “not real,” though, and we are left with the work on earth, and now work on the moon (Musk’s rocket is crashing into the moon — who voted him god of luna?) and on mars. This is probably one of a million things a “Jesus/Messiah” would discuss at the roundtable — who gives them the right to do this?

“So it has been following a somewhat chaotic orbit since February 2015,” Berger added.

Space observers believe the rocket – about four metric tonnes of “space junk” – is on course to intersect with the moon at a velocity of about 2.58km/s in a matter of weeks.

Bill Gray, who writes software to track near-Earth objects, asteroids, minor planets, and comets, has said the Falcon 9’s upper stage will very likely hit the far side of the moon, near the equator, on 4 March.

In a real world, yep, “The right questions: what the candidates should be asked.” This from a journalist, who turned 100 today — Morton Mintz. What would Jesus ask the candidates at the debates? Haha.

I actually wish him and his wife and his circle really good things in the coming years. I do. His BBBS — Bible Born Belief System — works for him. He also works for a homeless shelter in our county, which is good. I also think gaining fellowship outside proscribed arenas, like meeting someone on the street or in an informal way, is difficult, especially for men, males. Now. I understand that losing that is a lost opportunity. But this is not unusual. And, maybe we demonstrated, the two of us, that males with different opinions can’t find fellowship around ideas. A community of purpose, community of place, a community of beliefs, those are difficult to cultivate.

That’s how the cookie crumbles. Sure, I am saddened.

Larry (right): “Well, what happened was that the work slowed up for her. I don’t know, she was making pretty good money… Everything happened so fast and we didn’t know what to do. We were panicking and everything. We should’ve focused probably during the first time that we got the eviction notice. But, she was going through a lot things…” Lizette (left): “I’ve been trying to balance life, literally, emotionally, financially, socially, everything. I don’t where to go now. I don’t have a place to stay, a job. I’m getting to be homeless probably tonight because I’m getting evicted. So, we are trying to get out from our situation, but we are down there.” Photography courtesy of David Blumenkrantz and the One of Us project.

“A lot people can’t tell that we’re homeless, only because we keep clean clothes and we go places where we can clean our clothes and we shower on a daily basis.” — Mary Ellen & Deshaun. Photography courtesy of David Blumenkrantz and the One of Us project.

Spot Light on Poverty!

The assault on not just our land, air, soil, food, but on our minds continues daily at breakneck speed, and again the question is, But who voted to approve these obscenities?

Example One —

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force awarded SpaceX a $102 million five-year contract to demonstrate technologies and capabilities to transport military cargo and humanitarian aid around the world on a heavy rocket. 

The contract is for the rocket cargo program, a new project led by the Air Force Research Laboratory to investigate the utility of using large commercial rockets for Department of Defense global logistics.

Greg Spanjers, rocket cargo program manager, said in a statement to SpaceNews that the contract formalizes a government-industry partnership to help “determine exactly what a rocket can achieve when used for cargo transport, what is the true capacity, speed, and cost of the integrated system.”

The contract, awarded Jan. 14, was not announced by the Air Force and was first reported by AviationWeek.com. 

This is the largest contract awarded to date for rocket cargo. U.S. Transportation Command in 2020 signed cooperative research and development agreements with SpaceX and Exploration Architecture Corporation (XArc) to study concepts for rapid transportation through space. The command last month also signed a CRADA with Blue Origin.

We have no public transportation. Imagine that, no true connected public rail system to move people, and goods around the US, Mexico and Canada. Instead, we have a shortage of 18-wheel long-haul drivers. Again, who voted for a completely dirty, inefficient, rotting system of rednecks crisscrossing the continent in dangerous and grid-locking 18-wheelers? So, the “industry” (be careful of that moniker) states there is an 80,000 shortfall of drivers right now!

When driving alongside a semi-truck, you don’t really expect to look over and see a teenager behind the wheel. That could potentially change in the near future, should a bipartisan infrastructure bill pass the U.S. Senate.

The Developing Responsible Individuals for a Vibrant Economy Act, also called the DRIVE Safe Act, has been introduced as part of an effort to fill the long-lasting trucker shortage with drivers as young as 18 years old.

Then, more mercenaries recruited for big bonuses: Make that the disgusting US Army,

You know how messed up the USA is, from A to Z, and the news continues to illustrate the dying empire. Paying punks to enlist in the killing machine!

FORT CAMPBELL, KY — The U.S. Army is offering its largest bonus ever for new recruits with up to $50,000 available to qualified individuals who sign on for a six-year active-duty enlistment.

The total incentive package for a new recruit is based on a combination of incentives offered for the selected career field, individual qualifications, length of the enlistment contract, and the ship date for training.

In the past, enlistment incentives for full-time soldiers could not exceed $40,000.

The Army is competing for the same talent as the other services as well as the private sector and must have the ability to generate interest in the current employment environment, according to Maj. Gen. Kevin Vereen, who leads U.S. Army Recruiting Command in its mission to fill full-time and part-time vacancies in about 150 career fields in the regular Army and the Army Reserve.

“This is an opportunity to entice folks to consider the Army,” said Brig. Gen. John Cushing, who serves as the deputy commanding general for operations under Vereen at USAREC. “We’ve taken a look at the critical (military occupational specialties) we need to fill in order to maintain the training bases, and that is where we place a lot of our emphasis.”

And, yes, we are on the Corporate Plantation, and Biden is one example of plantation master deluxe: Story, On the Biden Plantation

Biden is nothing if not consistent and transparent. He does see himself as the boss who tells Black people that they shouldn’t complain. As he famously said in the December 2020 meeting, “If it doesn’t count for y’all to hell with y’all!” 

But now the bloom is truly off the rose. The campaign lies and the failure to address the covid pandemic make it difficult for all but the dead enders to support Biden and vice president Kamala Harris. The Black political class will fulfill their role and continue to put lipstick on the pig. The people aren’t fooled though and they won’t turn out in the numbers needed to keep democrats in control of congress. Although democratic control means very little. The military industrial complex gets $770 billion in funding regardless of who is in control. Biden has pledged not to provide medicare for all and he didn’t even present a public option for health care. As for claims that the democrats are more environmentally friendly, Biden has approved more oil and gas drilling permits on public land than the Trump administration did.

Biden is hoisted on his own petard of obedience to the ruling class. Black voters get little more than improved twitter posts. Then again, when Kamala Harris writes drivel such as, “Because of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, America is moving again. That’s what infrastructure is all about: getting people moving,” one wonders if even that is true. — Margaret Kimberley’s is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents  

Yeah, Ralph Nader did get on the Amy George Soros Goodman hour today, Democracy Now. He did attempt to illuminate. He is, of course, marginalized by both Democrats and Republicans.

RALPH NADER: Well, the two-hour news conference was deliberate. I think he wanted to show his stamina. And he had a great opportunity to communicate a lot of important things, which he didn’t do.

By the same token, the media did not make itself proud. It had a very narrow range of questions, and huge areas were never asked. They never asked about climate disruption and the Republican opposition to doing anything about it. They didn’t ask about the military budget, where Congress gave Biden $24 billion more than the Pentagon even asked for. They didn’t ask about the drain on the Treasury from hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare, which is a kind of corporate socialism. They didn’t ask about the corporate crime wave that is ripping off consumers and exploiting labor in this country and has been reported around the country. And he didn’t raise those questions, either.

They raised the antitrust issue — he raised it, properly, for meatpacking companies controlling and the pricing of meat products. But no one asked him: Well, if he’s so keen on antitrust and anti-monopoly policy, why isn’t he demanding larger budgets? There are very few federal antitrust cops on the corporate monopoly beat at the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice.

Most interestingly, the press didn’t ask about what his attorney general is going to do to prosecute Donald Trump. We’ve written letters to Merrick Garland listing one criminal federal statute after another that he openly and brazenly violated, including political events on the White House lawn, which is a crime under the Hatch Act. No answer whatsoever. No special counsel being appointed to investigate and recommend prosecution of this criminal recidivist Donald J. Trump, who has never seen a law that he hasn’t violated.

So, if you look at the big picture, it was a very disappointing press conference from both sides — the issues that Biden didn’t raise and the dittohead-type narrow range of questions from the media. (source)

He has to beat those dead horses, multiple times, year after year . . . dead horses tied to the fact there are no real journalists in the legacy media, and that there are no cops working the FTC or DoJ. He is spot on, but he never gets on NPR or PBS or Fox or CBS. Nader is spot on about Republicans being fascistic and messianic. Worse:

And the reporters didn’t take him to task there. The reporters, either they’re not doing their homework or they’re full of taboos. I mean, they never raise the corporate supremacy over our country. There isn’t a single agency in the federal government that isn’t influenced maximally by corporate lobbies. And Congress is swarmed by corporate lobbies. You have 500 drug company lobbyists full-time assigned to Congress, and there are 535 members of Congress. And these corporations are strategically commercializing every aspect of our society, commercializing childhood, strategically planning the tax system, the food system, the health system, fighting global warming remedies, the fossil fuel industry, ExxonMobil. They’re planning our genetic inheritance. Commercializing childhood should be a left-right issue, conservative issue. The press never asks about it. The self-censorship of the press is overwhelming. That’s why we have to have a more independent media.

We have to have — I mean, look at the coverage of Ukraine. As Katrina pointed out, if our country was invaded in a span of 40 years from the north, with 50 million casualties, what do you think we would do? Do you think we would just station troops on the northern border? We would have taken over the northern country and annexed it. And that’s why dictator Putin can get away with what he’s doing now, in terms of public opinion of the impoverished Russian people, is because they remember. They have their casualties in their families from the western frontiers, started with Napoleon.

And here we are, expanding a military alliance for arms sales for the military-industrial complex, because, as was pointed out, a condition of joining NATO is to buy the F-16 and other weapons in Eastern European countries. NATO is a military alliance organized against the Soviet Union. And now they’re expanding it in Eastern Europe and putting troops there. It’s, here we go again, a completely preventable conflict. What Putin really wants is Ukraine never to join NATO, no strategic offensive weapons in the Ukraine. He’s asking for ending strategic weapons in Europe — that is not going to happen.

But the press asks war-inciting questions. NPR asked it. David Sanger asked it. They asked war-inciting questions. It’s like Vietnam all over again. It’s like Iraq all over again. They don’t ask peace-inciting questions about diplomacy. And this is a dangerous situation, and the press just isn’t doing its job. It isn’t just Biden.

He can’t communicate how the GOP is opposed to everything that’s defined as human. You don’t make moral appeals to the GOP, like Senator Warnock just did. You show that they are opposed to sending $250 and $300 monthly checks to 65 million children, which has stopped now, and the GOP will not expand it. I mean, that’s a good political item to communicate to the American people. Those 65 million children come from conservative and liberal families who are both deprived. He doesn’t know how to communicate. The GOP knows what it wants. It’s messianic. It’s fascistic. It’s driven. And the communication from the Democrats, from the DNC to the White House, is weak. It’s anemic. And the public senses that.

Finally, a story NOT covered in legacy media or left wing media. Ralph doesn’t get it yet. He still believes in his book title, how billionaires will save the world.

He’s dead wrong. And, here it is, again, social impact investing, and the soul of humanity, especially youth, sucked up by the ultra rich and investment teams for their data and their compliance — The Internet of Bodies and Human Capital Futures Bets In Brazil

In the coming years, global financiers, will attempt to meld dynamic pricing and mobile payments with biometric digital identity, Internet of Body sensors, and blockchain smart contracts and then weave it all into an expansive spatial web meant to control our social and economic relations in both the material world and, through digital assets, rights and privileges, in the Metaverse, as well. Click here to listen to an interview I did with Bonnie Faulkner of Guns and Butter that goes into more detail about how impact investing connects to digital twins, and mixed reality.

Surely it is twisted to view communities as resource deposits of untapped data, but that is the logic of end-stage capitalism. The infrastructure needed to scale human capital finance profit are ICT (Individual Communication Technology) devices including phones, tablets, and inexpensive computers like chrome books; wearable technologies and biosensors; and 5-6G used in combination with data-dashboards that verify impact data against predictions and success metrics laid out in the terms of the deals. These are all things one finds in recreation centers in the United States now, and given inroads made by the Aspen Institute, Stanford, Harvard and the like, they will very likely become standard issue in the favelas, too. Not because any of it is good for children, but because the children’s data has value, and their compliance has value.

The Metaverse will be populated by compliant avatars. Beyond social impact, the conditioning of the young to cyborg life is going full throttle. Meanwhile for portfolio managers, children’s futures are just tranches of investment – data commodities. It’s only business.

Most people I talk with do not have the bandwidth or wherewithal to understand this next stage, end stage, capitalism, which is fascism, inverted totalitarianism, all bunched up in a world of chaos, all drawn and quartered on the backs of us, vis-a-vis all these scams of Build Back Better variety, or UN’s sustainability goals and Universal Basic Income propaganda, and the 4IR and WEF — the fourth industrial revolution is part and parcel of the Great Reset. This sort of stuff Alison writes about does get under many of our skins, but for the most part, I know so many people who have given up, who think that we all are data mined anyways, that we have all our info in the banking-IRS-DMV-insurance-medical-education superhighway of giving up all agency, anyway, so what’s the big deal we are being tracked, and what’s the big deal that our kids are being watched and what’s wrong with our ovaries and prostates and such being monitored by the Internet of Bodies and Nano-Things when we just have to lean back and enjoy this new world?

It is hard work drilling down, peeling back, and looking at ourselves in the black mirror of technology. But it has to be done.

If this graphic BELOW doesn’t bring chills to your spine, then you are one of the Zombies, or colonized, stuck in some suspended intellectual animation:

Danny writes a short but decent piece at Black Agenda Report — The Biden-Harris Administration is a Political Expression of the Empire’s Crisis of Legitimacy

Caveat — I don’t believe all the figures, all the bullshit of CDC, FDA, Pharma. All the Covid-19 deaths here, no vaccine deaths there crap. The entire systems is a house of cards, smoke and mirrors, manipulated numbers, and a continuing collusion operation. If you haven’t doubted the narratives of Fauci and CDC and Pfizer, and the million bucks given to Pfizer’s CEO, and all the systemic censorship, then you will not get the above story about harnessing our youth, their minds, and their bodies by the very same people running the covid show.

Danny:

COVID-19 continues to spread with rapid ferocity across the United States. On January 14th, the U.S. surpassed 850,000 COVID-19 deaths. More deaths from the pandemic have accumulated under President Joe Biden than his predecessor, Donald Trump. Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s lack of competence in addressing the pandemic has damaged the credibility of the administration. The Biden administration’s approval rating has fallen to 33 percent , a 22 percent decrease from a year ago.

Biden and Harris are political expressions of the American Empire’s crisis of legitimacy. The crisis has reached an acute stage that neither Biden nor Harris is capable of managing without significant political consequences. This has led to a number of cringe-worthy public relations moments for the administration. In an NBC News interview , Kamala Harris expressed that the administration would not change course on its COVID-19 strategy. “It is time for us to do what we have been doing and that time is every day,” said Harris. When Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked about the myriad of problems facing the Biden administration, she responded with the following : “I think that having worked in the White House before, you do hard things in White Houses . . . and could certainly propose legislation to see if people support bunny rabbits and ice cream, but that wouldn’t be very rewarding for the American people.”

Such rhetoric does not exactly exude confidence from an administration that claimed it would “Build Back Better” out of the Donald Trump administration. The truth is that Biden’s promise to “Build Back Better” was always a branding exercise. Biden’s ineptness is a reflection of the historic decay of the Democratic Party. After eight years of Obamamania, Democratic Party elites gambled their political capital on the sale of non-stop fear of Donald Trump to their constituents in order to soothe their wounded psyches following the embarrassment that was the 2016 election. Biden struggled to gain credibility in the 2020 primary from the outset but was finally given the elite’s blessing to take the reins of the Democratic Party’s sinking ship.

Are We the Sum Total of Our Life, Theirs, Inside Our Darkest Thoughts?

by Paul Haeder / January 19th, 2022

There is no such thing as an ending. At the conclusion of any work of art, just like at the conclusion of any experience, what we arrive at is a site of interpretation. Every reader commits a creative act at that site. Every reader creates a version of their own artwork within their act of reading. No author can ever succeed at holding a singular ending in place, stable, unwavering.   — Lidia Yuknavitch

Telling one’s story is never easy. But it is the staff of life. A story, a memoir, anti-memoir, a story of a people, of a tribe, of a family, of a nation. We can have stories that are collectively anthropological, like Guns Germs and Steel (The Fates of Human Societies — previously titled Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years — a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond. In 1998, Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005)

We can have Debt: The First 5,000 Years ( David Graeber lays out the historical development of the idea of debt, starting from the first recorded debt systems in the Sumer civilization around 3500 BC. In this early form of borrowing and lending, farmers would often become so mired in debt that their children would be forced into debt peonage).

Or, Das Kapital, also known as Capital: A Critique of Political Economy  is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy, critique of political economy and politics by Karl Marx. (Marx aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production in contrast to classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. While Marx did not live to publish the planned second and third parts, they were both completed from his notes and published after his death by his colleague Friedrich Engels. Das Kapital is the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.)

But we all have read famous and not so famous people’s accounts of their lives, with some autobiographical hitching post, or some life changing event or series of events to define that person as an individual. With that, we hope as writers that we can find audience.

That the reader(s) will infer their own place in the world around what events and what creative expression of those events have done to shape us, the writer.

It is a given almost to a tee that places like Dissident Voice and myriad other places on the Internet or once just in print have facilitated the concept of story, of narrative, of frames. Here, at Dissident Voice, just reading Edward Curtain’s pieces, one can see that narrative for him ties into commentary and philosophical musings in the current societal dynamics.

Story is all we have, really, and memory is what we attempt to reclaim, even though memory is faulty. Forgetting is part of the human condition, or should be, as a way of not going crazy with all the bad and horrible things that have happened to us, that we have perpetrated and that are befalling the world.

We are in our own funhouse, or madhouse. We are the sum total of all events. However, we do not deal with the sum total, that is for sure. I remember the time with John Francis, and I read his books, talked to him on the phone and interviewed him in person as he was brought to Spokane to some of the colleges I was associated with as a speaker.

Planet Walker he called himself, and he decided early on, witnessing an oil spill under the Golden Gate bridge, to stop using fossil fuel transportation and to stop talking, a vow of silence, but that went on for almost two decades. Please, watch below.

Or, if you have bandwidth, listen to some of my old radio shows put up on my personal blog, here — Podcasts, including John Francis.

I’ve been with hundreds of people as a journalist and writer, and many more as a young person who has had the benefit of growing up and traveling around places like BC, Canada, Azores, UK, Ireland, many parts of the USA, before age 13. I took those early days of listening to elders’ stories into my own avocation and beat-up career as a writer. My work may have featured their work on some environmental or social justice issue, or even in in my beat reporting as a newspaper journalist. But the drilling down, and the real conversations were always about “me,” the person in some state of evolution. So many wanted to give life to their previoius lives, to families, to their own trauma and lamentations. They always wanted to frame themselves, and to give me, a writer, some sense of depth to who they are.

Here, some narratives of mine still alive on the worldwide death net:

“Finding Fringe,” Portland, Street Roots.

Real Change News, Seattle.

Only partial list of my magazine beat, “Metro Talk,” Spokane Magazine.

The Pacific Northwest Weekly Inlander. Again, partial list.

I certainly have had great people like Terry Tempest Williams and David Suzuki and Winona LaDuke provide me and millions of their readers collectively their narratives, their own steps in their very multilayered and dynamic lives. Those three are global people, and that adds to the shine of their pedigrees and their own place in our lives as readers and participants of their work, words and sightlines to the future.

Scroll down on my blog here and listen to my interview of Suzuki.

That is it, a future understood by ground truthing the past, and that is gathered through our pasts, “their” pasts, through the connectedness of their own lives, young and now, and with our own collective interconnectivity no matter how disconnected the powers that be want us to live in their own chaos.

Reclaiming the Sacred, Reclaiming the World, Reclaiming Land, Language, History. Reclaiming Ourselves. This is the process of living in the world, living inside the hell hole of Capital, but being part of the world around us, understanding the history of so much dedigration, holding the amazing amounts of pain inflicted by governments, families and societies. Doing that is where story begins, even if it stays as foundational and never ends up in the actual literature of memoir writing.

I am teaching a memoir writing class, upcoming. Here on the Oregon Coast, during a time of the Omega-cron, under the gray clouds of the fear project of Capitalists and the Felons of Profits. It is a community education class, and I get a few shekels for the class of six currently signed up, right now. Below is an Op-Ed just published in the Local Rag, Newport News Times.

I have hitched my own writing to my own life, the journeys, the far off worlds in my mind tied to the walkabouts, the odd journeys I have undertaken to live in the world.

Here, “Bird Stamp,” a short story, but while made up, there is so much memory and memoir-like inflections. It’s won some awards. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Here’s the text from the old newspaper where I worked — Pacific Northwest Weekly Inlander. 

I am always collecting people, themes, their words, their lives, and that is through their rag-tag, sometimes, stories. Here at DV, I have had readers take the effort to send me a note, via email, sometimes in snailmail, about something I wrote that triggered their own push to tell, to story-tell. The emails have come from around this continent and the world. Seventeen years thus far.

Here is one that just came in:

“Naive Documentary (-ies) Makers Barely Scratch the Surface!”

Hey Friend! I used to live in Portland. I emailed you once. Thought we might meet up. Never happened. I’ve returned “home.” Frankfort KY. Trying an unlikely reconciliation with my brothers, both ‘trumpetateers.’ Oh well. It’s late. Very late. I’m 77. I’ve not got long, or at least not as long as I had. I haven’t been reading you recently. You lay it on thick, brother. If I may … today, though, I liked the catchy title and didn’t see your name on it. Read it though and thought: shit! this sounds like Paul. And there was your name at the bottom. Pure poetry. I thought hell this should be a pome–poem. You’re a cage rattler. Mine. I owe 1/4 million in student debt; declared bankruptcy 3 times and could another, but I’m so poor the debt collectors can’t seem to touch me (only in america!); a convicted felon (fighting with NYC cops back in the ’70s)–of course if I’d been black I’d be dead or … at least spent my suspended sentences on Rikers; jail bird, nonetheless: a year in military prison for refusing orders to the US war on Vietnam; a sight for sore eyes: a former transwoman–now a non-binary something or other; definetly a member of the 20%.

John

Ah-ah. The life captured in one paragraph, and if John was here and had the inkling, he’d be one hell of a student writer in the class, someone who could teach me a thing or two.

And, of course, how do we, the Americans, get those people like John above captured in the hearts and minds of us, the citizens, when the media is controlled by six companies, publishing is controlled by even foreign monopolies, and most movies every made now are perverted, broken down things, poor written, and right there at the warped end of things? People with a Hollywood or East Coast bias who see the John’s of the world as, well, useless, never want their real stories. Yet those stories are of us, the 80 percent, and need to be aired, read and discussed. Those elites deeming what is not of storytelling worth. Great survivors who might even not end up as minor characters set on a street, riffraff, homeless, poor and broken.

That is what Studs Terkel fought against, and he went into the lives of the people of his time, of his city, of this country.

That memoir writing is also couched in struggle, overcoming it, and in rare memoirs, not overcoming it. Anti-memoir memoir — fictionalized.

Memoirs are different from autobiographies because they are about specific moments in time instead of offering a look at a chronological period of time. Fictionalized memoirs are different from standard memoirs because of the inclusion of fiction or fictional writing techniques. If the names or places of a memoir are changed to protect those involved, then this would be classified as a fictionalized memoir.

+–+

I think we understand our own life experiences in narrative terms. If you consider that idea for a moment, we are walking novels. No one has a pure identity. Everyone has an identity made from everyone they’ve ever known and loved or hated, and from every experience they could process and withstand, happy or sad, arranged in memories, otherwise known as stories.

So writing my anti-memoir meant creating a composition and inventing narrative forms to convey some experiences from my life.

And writing a novel meant creating a composition and inventing narrative forms to convey some experiences—some imagined, some real—from life. The only difference involved the fact that some content doors remained closed in nonfiction, but even that’s a hoax. I opened them anyway.

I’m thrilled the two books can co-exist now. In some ways they complete one another. Fiction multiplies the possibilities of nonfiction. Nonfiction deeply informs the fiction writer’s desires and impulses and limitations. In a way, nonfiction is simply a snapshot of the edges around any given writer’s imagination. —   Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water,

My own story collection, fiction, is all about fusing memoir and new journalism with hard hitting fiction. Order it from Cirque Press — keep our press alive. At Cirque Press, you will see 28 books by writers, and many books are poetry collections and novels and some memoirs. All are tributes to finding self.

Building community is so important, especially at this time. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to publish with Cirque. You do so much more than publish books. You support your authors individually and collectively and work hard to create connection. Leah Stenson, author, Life Revisited

My work there, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam. Review here at DV by Linda Ford and Street Roots by Emily Green.

The art of remaking-retelling a story

Paul Haeder, Newport News Times, 1/19/22

The last few years on planet Earth have been pregnant ones: People facing existential crises and a world seemingly going to hell in a hand basket. SARS-CoV2 and lockdowns are SELCE’s in all our lives: significant emotional life-changing events!

As a writer on the coast, I’ve found subjects for a column, “Deep Dive – Go Beneath the Surface with Paul Haeder” (Oregon Coast Today) endless. We have deeply interesting people.

That’s my wiring. A young journalist of 17 who “hard-scrabbled” into desert haunts in Arizona and throughout Mexico, discovering people’s narratives — wherever they are in their proverbial walkabouts — highly compelling.

It’s a form of biographical parachuting, and a kind of thievery — entering people’s worlds, getting to know them fast and furiously, and then capturing those facts and memories in creative nonfiction.

I’ve been doing this stealing for almost 50 years. With that eclectic pedigree, I hope to see a few interested writers here in Lincoln County signing up for my community education class, Memoir Writing, at OCCC’s Waldport campus.

The title is just one stone in the cairn of stories I hope we as a class can share.

My first gig teaching the art of creative memoir writing occurred when I was young, 29, with the Center for Lifelong Learning at UT-El Paso. In that community/continuing education class, I helped shepherd amazing life forces of 15 students in the first session:

• a Dachau survivor who ended up in El Paso as a doctor;

• a former colonel in the Army who was in the Bataan Death March;

• a criminal defense attorney who defended rough dudes, including narcotraficantes along the U.S.-Mexico border;

• a female truck driver of over 50 years who saw all of the U.S., Canada and some of Mexico as a long-hauler;

• a young guy who won $1.5 million in a state lottery but ended up opening up two clinics in Juarez to treat the poor;

• a doctor who worked in Guatemala and El Salvador performing cleft palette operations pro bono.

We came together as survivors, and some of the better memoir and anti-memoir pieces flowed from regular folk: a farmer of chilies, a lady who raised seven kids who all went onto college, a construction company owner who learned how to read after he made his first million, at age 50.

For this Tuesday, 2 to 3:30 p.m. class, we will explore how people in this neck of the woods got here at the edge of the Cascadia Subduction Zone. I believe in the Mission Impossible opener as a frame for this laid-back class: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to uncover some of the layers of your spiritual-intellectual-emotional-historical life onion.

I like what Lidia Yyuknavitch says about the process of writing self: “I think our identities — the ones we live in the real world — are really made partly from stories that we build up around ourselves, necessary fictions, so that we can bear the weight of our own lives. We like to call these ‘truths’ or ‘facts’ or ‘selves,’ but I maintain that they are fictions. Fictions for instance called ‘mother’ or ‘wife’ or ‘lover’ or ‘teacher’ or ‘writer.’”

For my premiere long-form column, Deep Dive, I went into the life and aspirations of a great white shark scientist who did open water research of these sharks in waters off South Africa, Dyer Island. Then, the column took off because, a) I was open to any sort of human being living in Lincoln County who had a story to tell. The stories came at me like a tsunami. Not all were of made-for-TV-movie intensity. However, the common theme in these more than 35 pieces is “perseverance under adversity.”

And, b), it takes time to listen in order to uncover. Carol Van Strum is another gem I wrote about — she fought the aerial spraying of herbicides in her Five Rivers’ area and wrote a book, “A Bitter Fog,” to capture this battle.

We will work on each student’s individual projects — some will want book length tell-alls, and others will want a life compressed into a few dozen pages. The best part of this memoir writing course is we will experiment.

There are other ways to skin a cat, so to speak. We can resist the universal desire to uncover a dirty pile of secrets. We can write with a level of frankness, and candidness.

That sort of writing can “welcome talk, but not cover all the personal details.”

The “I” in this form of expression is fluid: we have to discover ways to bring in the reader, and deliver the reader a conversation. Some in the class will want to capture a life SELCE. That’s fine. Others will want to explore the meaning of life through their own eyes.

This includes how we all “get through” by deploying universal truths. For some of us, we need to get that down on paper: an essay, fiction story, an entire book? The goal is the same — writing “self.”

Our mission is to share and wordsmith, so the class gets down to brass tacks — writing ourselves into something others might respond to positively and with a keen sense of their own lives.

For information, go to https://oregoncoast.edu/communityed

Paul K. Haeder is a novelist, journalist, educator and author of “Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam,” Cirque Press.

Isn’t it really puzzling that “a large portion of U.S. aid to Israel is classified”? — Grant F. Smith, “Ten ways the Israel lobby ‘moves’ America,” 7/25/2016

Israel’s Influence: Good or Bad for America? An analysis of the history, size, scope and activities of Israel affinity organizations and their increasingly negative—but little known—impact on all Americans.

Do a deep dive and look into all those upper echelon Admin folk, all of them, and their attitudes about people, us, the regular schmucks. Really, have the guts to parse into that. Billionaires in the shadows, and multimillionaires up front and center. The elite, the controllers, the gatekeepers, the amazing beautiful people, the moneyed and the influential. Ivy League, banking and Wall Street pedigrees, million dollar loans, free helping hand up to hedge funds, fiat money, houses, paid board memberships, speaking fees in thehundreds of thousands of dollars for each Power Point or TED Talk like Goldman Sachs wine and dine club.

Have you ever seen a pauper in administrations? Have there ever been poor people put on these committees? How many states utilize the voices of us, the 80 percent, in charrettes, committees, white papers, research tasks, meetings, sounding boards, public engagement workshops?

You ever going to see an amputee caused by, diabetes, with double jowls and threadbare clothes being interviewed by the stenographers of the rich, US mainstream-corporate media? Below, from Scheer Post, a reprinted story on this guy. Not the one who is the vampire asleep to the right. We are talking about the guy with the curly hair. Another worthless human. But, he is ruling the roost and running society into the gutter, in his own specialized way. He’d never go toe to toe with anyone who might question the entire drama of the planned pandemic and the suicidal responses by everyone making a buck off the show. EVERYONE. Conflict of Interest is a requirement for the job in DC!

Biden Urged to Fire Covid Response Chief Over ‘Damning’ Failures

Zients was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Kensington, Maryland. His family is Jewish. Zients graduated from the St. Albans School prep school in 1984 and received a degree in political science from Duke University, graduating summa cum laude in 1988

CDC freak?

Walensky was born Rochelle Paula Bersoff in Peabody, Massachusetts, to Edward Bersoff and Carol Bersoff-Bernstein, a Jewish family. She was raised in Potomac, Maryland.

Vet science guy who is head of Pfizer —

Bourla was born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece. His parents, who were Sephardi Jews, were among the 2,000 of 50,000 Jews in Thessaloniki to survive the Holocaust; According to Bourla, his mother was allegedly minutes away from execution by firing squad when she was spared via a ransom paid to a Nazi Party official by her non-Jewish brother-in-law, while his father happened to be out of the Jewish ghetto when the residents were taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp and went into hiding, never to see his parents again.

Then, the disasterous war mongers —

Blinken was born on April 16, 1962, in Yonkers, New York, to Jewish parents, Judith (Frehm) and Donald M. Blinken, who later served as U.S. Ambassador to Hungary. His maternal grandparents were Hungarian Jews. Blinken’s uncle, Alan Blinken, served as the American ambassador to Belgium. His paternal grandfather, Maurice Henry Blinken, was an early backer of Israel who studied its economic viability, and his great-grandfather was Meir Blinken, a Yiddish writer.

Sherman was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to a Jewish family. Her father, Malcolm Sherman, was a Marine originally from Philadelphia. While she was in elementary school, her family moved to Pikesville, Maryland, and Sherman attended Pikesville High School. Sherman attended Smith College from 1967 to 1969, and graduated from Boston University in 1971 in the field of sociology and urban studies. In 1976, she earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of Maryland. She subsequently began her career as a social worker, before going into politics.

Even Kamala Harris, still, with these elites discussing her marriage — from Jerusalem Post: It is not surprising that the Jewish community is excited to be represented on the Biden-Harris ticket. Political leanings of the community aside, Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, is a member of the tribe, and two of Joe Biden’s children are married to someone who is Jewish.

But sadly, the Jewish community is a bit selective in celebrating interfaith marriage. If it brings us a Jewish second gentleman, we will cheer. But interfaith marriage is still taboo to many, and an Orthodox or Conservative rabbi would not have been allowed to preside over the Harris and Emhoff wedding.

American Jews want to celebrate the Jewish ties of any famous person while still discriminating against the relationships that tie these individuals to the Jewish community.

J Post article.

A tribe indeed, according the WikiPedia page (referrency the above early life bios), and then the JP! What do people’s families and educations and influences and religious and economic narratives and tribes have to do with their worldview? Interesting! Jewish newspapers in Israel highlighting, well, their tribe’s participation in Criminal Capitalism — Jewish Members of the 117th Congress

1. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain
2. Secretary of State Antony Blinken
3. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen
4. US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides
5. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas
6. Member of Council of Economic Advisers Jared Bernstein
7. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry/Cohen
8. COVID-19 Czar Jeff Zients
9. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky
10. US Attorney General Merrick Garland
11. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines
12. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Ruth Sherman
13. Science and Technology Adviser Eric Lander
14. Deputy National Security Advisor Ann Neuberger
15. Deputy CIA Director David Cohen
16. Deputy Health Secretary Rachel Levine
17. US Special Representative for Iran Robert Malley
18. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff
19. Thomas Nides likely to be US ambassador to Israel,

Biden says —

“They will tell me what I need to know, not what I want to know.” They. Who are they, the big they, the tribe of “they,” or the elite “they,” or those who would bow and kneel to the big war criminal deluxe, Kissinger? That is certainly emblematic of how rotten the spines are in the ruling class (sic). One tribe, and it maybe Catholic, or Jewish, bringing into the fold the others. The Others from Another Mother!

I am always intrigued by the press and the leaders in the generalized Jewish community who make sure to point out the who’s who in the Jewish “tribe” as they all it. Hollywood, medicine, physics, finance, money. Here, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, headline — Here are the 37 Jewish members of Congress

Michael Bennet, Colorado
Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut
Ben Cardin, Maryland
Dianne Feinstein, California
Jon Ossoff, Georgia (freshman)
Jacky Rosen, Nevada
Bernie Sanders, Vermont
Brian Schatz, Hawaii
Charles Schumer, New York
Ron Wyden, Oregon
Jake Auchincloss,
Massachusetts
Suzanne Bonamici, Oregon
David Cicilline, Rhode Island
Steve Cohen, Tennessee
Ted Deutch, Florida
Lois Frankel, Florida
Josh Gottheimer, New Jersey
Sara Jacobs, California
David Kustoff, Tennessee
Andy Levin, Michigan
Mike Levin, California
Alan Lowenthal, California
Elaine Luria, Virginia
Kathy Manning, North Carolina
Jerry Nadler, New York
Dean Phillips, Minnesota
Jamie Raskin, Maryland
Jan Schakowsky, Illinois
Adam Schiff, California
Brad Schneider, Illinois
Kim Schrier, Washington
Brad Sherman, California
Elissa Slotkin, Michigan
Debbie Wasserman
Schultz, Florida
Susan Wild, Pennsylvania
John Yarmuth, Kentucky

And, another fine mess we are in, Olly — A who’s who of the powerful, the Peter Principle pirates, the reverse social Darwinism befefactors, and the criminals now being preened as statesmen and heroes. One guy — the influencer war criminal:

Welcoming War Crimes: The Normalization of Henry Kissinger

On Thursday February 2nd, the Institute of Politics will host “A Conversation with Henry Kissinger.” On its website, the IOP describes the controversial statesman with two titles:

“Henry A. Kissinger

Chairman, Kissinger Associates, Inc.

56th United States Secretary of State”

They neglect a third, more accurate label: War Criminal.

During his brief tenure at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger got a lot done. In his first two years in office, he helped Richard Nixon sabotage Vietnamese peace talks for his own political gain, expanded that war into Laos and Cambodia (the destabilizing effects of which would pave the way for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the death of up to two million people), and advocated the bombing of, in his own words, “anything that moves.”

In 1971, Kissinger backed Pakistan in its war against Bangladesh despite evidence of massacre and rape. In ‘73, he orchestrated a military coup against the democratically elected Allende regime of Chile, installing in its stead the violently oppressive Pinochet dictatorship. And in ‘75, the then-Secretary of State lent his tacit support to President Suharto of Indonesia―himself a despot already responsible for the mass killings of hundreds of thousands―in the deadly conquest of East Timor. Kissinger himself, in proposing an intervention in Cyprus, summed up his philosophy best: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

Appalling though this all may be, Kissinger’s most enduring legacy is subtler in its malignance. The foreign policy of Henry Kissinger is defined, above all, by an utter contempt for human life and absolute pursuit of “American interests.” For every one of Kissinger’s crimes that goes unpunished and for every bit of praise he receives, the belief that the United States can do whatever it wants with the rest of the world is further concretized. Behind every thoughtless, disastrous intervention since then―behind the mujahideen and the Contras, behind the Iraq war and the El Mozote Massacre―is the work of Henry Kissinger.

When the IOP invites Henry Kissinger to the Harvard Kennedy School with no representation of opposition views, they are doing more than “hosting a conversation.” They are providing a platform for the insidious belief that the lives of others, particularly those of poor people of color in the “developing” world, are mere pawns in the pursuit of American ends. Like telling a racist joke, the harm of this “conversation” is not merely in the act itself, but also in the seeds that it sows in our cultural consciousness―the legitimization that it confers.

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This never ends, these remade war criminals, these banking thieves, these Panama Papers thieves of the ultimate category — national killers.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s remarks about Israel’s dominance of big data, connectivity and artificial intelligence: “With the click of a button, you can bring down nations to their knees very rapidly… Because every system can be hacked”! PM Netanyahu’s Remarks at the Cyber-Tech Conference

“Well here is another fine mess you to me into!”

Ahh, the tribe of the Ivy League, the Council on Foreign Affairs, Davos, Alpine Institute, World Economic Forume, Skull and Bones Club, Bilderberg, et al.

There can be no other work in journalism than to uncover who is in control, and who controls the controllers. No other way to say this, but we need to not have this softball childish celebrity Q & A or whitewashing crap that has turned into celebrity TV-Cable mush, or the comics making idiotic journalistic attempts at commentary. We need these people exposed, and we need to have the guts to look into their paymasters, their spying armies, and if they are proud of their Catholic roots, their Harvard sheepskin, their rugby pals down under, their own upbringings and family lines and ties. Then we need to get at them, and bring them down, by any means necessary. Cuz whitey’s not just on the moon, but in the ether, inside nanochips, going to Mars, sinking digital teeth into everything, into all manner of humanity. Whitey is Going Transhuman, and Whitey on the Moon aint nothing like Whitey in your Brain, in your Chip, in your blood!