WHY CAN’T TUCSON GROW UP?
(And How Could We Tell If It Did?)

(#52722)

From the roof of the Arizona Hotel the market forces

mass

On every horizon sheer cliffs of glass unscalable

by any lone messenger

Crowd in

around the abandoned meter base, the aliens

have landed, they walk among us in business

suits, we should just leave, but we’re invested

and have to rebuild another wrecked air conditioning system,

Something is wrong but nobody will listen to me

a lonely truth

is an unforgiven thing

people who need people

trust the judgment of crowds and the values

of business

and so we are all gathered together again in beautiful downtown Tucson

to once again trust that a coalition of art and business

will not result in self conscious touristy art

that pop culture will not become the society of the spectacle

that it won’t be déjà vu all over again

and nobody will come here because it’s too crowded

because we believe

that consciousness is inherent in numbers,

and only occurs in certain

locations, locations, locations, but what if your sculpture

is only a foot across the line does it lose

gravitas all at once or gradually?

People who need people

Say money talks but like talk

Radio does it ever

Say anything?

Money just does what it wants

Money has value

but does it have any values

beyond growth for growth’s sake?

The Martin Luther King apartments

that loom over me coming home

from late night service calls at restaurants

miles east of here block

the Catalinas, microwave, radio, and television

towers mock

the need to reach out and touch

someone this is

dense shit we’re in, my friend, this thick

sick slick sad gross

medium

of an impossible exchange all men being

created unequal, there being

a hell in any truth held to

be self

evident any thing held to too

long, nothing stays without becoming

staid but

every atom and molecule in our bodies came from the stars

and they all formed as if an intelligence inhered in their

organization so I believe in community and so

like an ant or bee or cog in a clockwork

orange or blue or green I have to serve but why

does the course of human evens have to be so unbearably

and self destructively stupid over and

over fixing up a place to leave

for moneybags to sit on. Why?

do we do this shit? Because people who need people

can’t think about it, because disturbed people disturb

the natural balance until the air we breathe

the water we drink, the food

we eat, set us on a track to addiction and

mental illness, abandoned children making more

abandoned children, where is the love?

where only the grossest of truths can be

communicated across chasms between sheer cliffs

of mis under

standings, chasms we think we cross and

fall into and still no

supremely wise counselor, mediator, or friend

to reconcile all these years of struggle we

ARE the aliens we worshipped and feared we bring ourselves

the injustice

of money because we are

the injustice of money

we are the aliens

and we come

from the stars

____________________________________________________________________

As a child grows its knowledge of the world outside expands and its awareness of other people and their concerns deepens. It learns boundaries, rules, social norms, egos and how to manipulate them, laws and how to break them, lies and how to tell them and within the limits set by love and money, how to sort out truth from fiction. Beyond this hard journey outward another dimension of growth obtains which could be summed up by one word, service. As an individual, a couple or a community grows it recognizes that, at some point beyond our understanding, self service is ultimately self defeating, that its health is tied to service to and the health of the greater community.

If this service is done blindly, the way love is blind, the way good soldiers serve in bad wars, as busy work like driving nails to prove you’re a carpenter, then we’re no better and probably a lot worse for the disservice to our so called brains, than ants or bees or lemmings. So part of growth is learning to dedicate time and energy to goals that reach out beyond unenlightened self interest and finally beyond human concerns to the natural community. And we get payback for that. Big time. We get our health, a connection to our real roots, something to give ourselves to that will outlast our bodies, and an understanding that life is more than bread and the body is more than meat and the life of the mind and the adventure of consciousness don’t have to be measured by money.

O no doubt we gotta have money, but if it’s the end all and be all we’re stuck in a perpetual adolescence, kind of like the local talk show, “The Business of Business” whose thesis seems to be: the business of business is business and doesn’t have to be concerned about service. If you just wouldn’t tax us, and let us locate where we want, and get rid of all these narrow minded environmental protection laws, why then everybody would make money and everything would be fine. If we poison the inner city and build out beyond the infrastructure we’ll make water out of money and air out of cement dust and we’ll grow food in nice, fresh asphalt. Give us a cross town highway, make all city planning, planning for a city of cars, tear down the old buildings, give us a tunnel and we’ll give you a vision.

But does urban growth necessarily mean growing up? “Does your job depend on growth?” The sly Socratic announcer asks, AH HA! GOTCHA! well then you have to vote for these aimless subdivisions with architecture from here & there & everywhere wandering the desert between here and Phoenix looking for an identity. It’s either that or starve……o alright then, you seem to have me over a barrel but, as Jack Benny used to say to “Your money or your life!”

“I’m thinking! I’m thinking!”

I’m thinking there’s a couple other seemingly contradictory things we usually get as we grow up, an awareness that we don’t have to be the center of attention, and a self image, a (mostly vague) idea of who we are and what we’re about. Unless, of course, you’re like me, a jack of all trades so you screw everything up. SOOO? What does Tucson DO? An air force base, missile technology, a university, open pit mining, a rock show, look at its navel and study its past, build houses for people who come here to get away from winter, bring all their pollen and live in upscale little barrios and rabbit warrens? Those are noble enough goals for any toddling town to hang its hat on, but I think we can do better.

We could exploit our most plentiful and underutilized resource: what one Spanish visitor in the seventeenth century called in his journal, "the most merciless of suns".

Concentrating (pun intended) on the sun would just enhance the crowd draw we now have. Who are Tucson? Tucson are a city who give good roof gardens, gardened walls for growing plants, PVs, water heating, hydrogen production, smokestack/algae biofuel production (http://web.mit.edu/erc/spotlights/alg-all.html). You come here to get away from winter, we also sell you solar heat, solar air conditioning, solar electricity and fuel for your vehicle. AND in the process, we MAKE

(our most valuable anti-resource) SHADE! Have you noticed how plants here love it? Shade our gardens so they’ll grow mo better. Shade our streets to counteract the heat island effect, make more cooling towers such as those at The Ronstadt Bus Depot. Plant more trees. A French Johnny Appleseed planted so many trees it increased the local rainfall. Install inflatable rubber dams and shade the Santa Cruz to make a river walk like they have in San Antonio (and at least one rose I'm told) www.thesanantonioriverwalk.com/

Maybe we could have our own private photo voltaic dirigible(s) which could be moved around to make SHADE where and when it was needed….what an example to the arctic about how to fight the loss of albedo, and to Montana and Colorado about about how not to lose their Aspens, and how to go from local to global in the fight against other climate change feedback loops.

And if we’re about hosting a university and utilizing the sun we should revisit the U of A's Rainbow Bridge Science Center. It wasn't a bridge to nowhere, it went OUTWARD (like people do when they grow up) to the rest of the known world where there may be monsters and MONEY. It would have built on and expanded the
Biosphere and The Environmental Research Lab at the airport. The Rainbow Bridge had IMAGE and as even the stupidest advertising people (including Dr. Bong in Howard The Duck) can tell you, "IMAGE IS EVERYTHING!" Build a Rainbow Bridge, and they will come. We might even get a little rain. A little rain would be nice.

It might even enhance our self image. And how, the nagging question repeats and repeats in this A.M. Radio the CIA implanted in my brain, would that make more money and be good for business? Well we HAD an International Arts Center and it DIED for lack of image. People came in there and asked,

“What IS this place? You got kick boxing and fencing….OK those are martial arts…and you got jewelry making and pottery, those are artsy craftsy…and you got gay dancing….that’s the art of dance….and you got a church…..I’m still confused.” The mission statement said it was to be a center for the exchange of international art and artists. And nobody on the city council could see that as being a crowd draw. A little town like Bisbee could host an international poetry festival, a little city like Cleveland, the butt of stand-up jokes with a river so polluted it burned one night, could become the host of the biggest performance art festival in the world, but Tucson? Tucson don’t know who it are yet, so it cain’t do nothin, much less take advantage of the 10x multiplier effect of art events on business. Awww poor baby! So through a series of crooked deals the historic old Y got torn down to make way for condos whose owner said he’d “GIVE” us a sculpture garden. Once demolition was finished he decided the market for condos wasn’t there and the International Arts Center became a hole in the ground for five years with an empty sign towering over it seeming to say everything

and nothing. And then? And then? Along came the university to make it into underground parking and student housing. So THAT’S the kind of city Tucson are? OK by me, let’s go with the flow and make mo dough. If we’re a university town let’s learn our children something. I think the rock show, Rio Nuevo and the wandering developments and even businesses that are all about business and nothing else could fit right in to an image of Tucson as a city of the sun whose university makes missiles and space exploration projects and solar technology.

On the other hand we do have local businesses that understand the principle that they’re not just producing or selling a product. These businesses say they’re about (and some actually are about) being a hub for community interaction from local to global: Whole Foods, Bookman’s, The Book Stop, The Food Conspiracy, Rillito Mortgage, and you can probably think of many others. They GET one of the primary principles of good salesmanship: that it’s not about them, it’s not about the medium of exchange, and it’s not about the product, it’s about the short and long term relationships and ultimately the sense of community that you form in the process of moving goods and money from one place and one person to another. And on the OTHER other hand, how many examples do you need that when the business of business is business it goes down in flames? G.M., The Keating Five, A.I.G., the crash of ’29 and the slippery slide and Not So Great Depression of ’09, and speaking of speculation, how about the real estate market….oh OK I give up, just keep on doing what you’re doing….listening to Rush Limbaugh and all those other champions of laissez faire capitalism as long as it makes them the center of attention. The reason they call them talk shows is the hosts have mouths that completely cover their ears. And there’s a reason, as Lincoln Steffens said, they go hand in glove with people who just wanna make money. And we gotta love ‘em: John Dillinger, Al Capone, Don Corleone, Joe and Bill Bonano, Willie Sutton, Bugsy Siegel. Love to play them on TV, love to have them as neighbors, city council members, family members….uh….wait a minute…..

Meanwhile back at the ranch the blood feud between the bitter conservative gasbags (“We’re totally self made people and we’re not giving you any of our hard earned money.”) and the whitebread liberals (“OK then we’ll just spend the pennies we have on feel good environmental projects and public art that nobody is really very passionate about”) goes on. (And on.)

All of which reminds me of one of the few things on which I agree with Henry Kissinger:

"The infighting is so bitter because the stakes are so small." (out of the mouths of Machiavellians)

but you know, speaking of people who don’t know how to listen, I haven't been asked to consult with the mayor and council in at least a month and it's been the longest since I was invited up to the White House to give Obama some advice on global warming & Afghanistan....

They’re probably just worried I'm not as big a fan as I used to be.

ON THE WAY HOME

It didn’t snow that night and it didn’t get as cold as they said it would, but it was cold and wet enough. There was a raw wind gusting from the South where the Alaskan low pressure system had swirled up from the Bay Of Mexico and the Baja. I could hear the rain on the camper roof all night. While it drove me crazy I thought about the two snails Roy, the juice bar baristo had saved for me in a paper cup. They were probably dying in the truck cab, because I forgot to put them in the pond when I got home. He had that sensitive, irritable, adolescent attitude a lot of ex junkies have, that everything is about them and everybody is a piece of shit. Women loved him for that. More! More punishment! More disrespect! they cried. He’d probably be real disappointed if I told him the snails died of my neglect after he saved them from the celery he was washing. And I’d have to tell him if he asked because I don’t lie worth a shit.

I also thought about having to tell Rick the Home staff refused my offer of his woodworking tools, and I was going to have to sell them to pay his back rent on the garage. How could I take the last thing this clinically depressed homeless man had to believe in away from him, so my sister could sit and babble her life away in a nursing home? Just one of many human miseries I have to exacerbate in my job as trustee and guardian of my inheritance of the darkness of a little corner of the earth called Texas. It is, after all, #1 in the death penalty, & gave us three presidents who gave us three big stupid wars.
It wasn’t a hard rain but it was relentless. I couldn’t obliterate it with the white noise hiss of escaping greenhouse gasses in the tiny butane tent heater with the controls I had to smash and jury rig and the whoosh of the tiny fan sitting on top of it. Roy loved the rain. I hated it. Because it reminded me of all the times things I was responsible for got ruined in it. Finally I put on clothes and walked out into the dark and wet, bitching and moaning, trying to find what scattered toys and mementos I wanted to save.
The wreckage of my art and writing. All the things it’s impossible to talk about. Write a letter to the editor, try calling NPR, or any other talk show.. ..they call them talk shows because they can’t listen…and if you do get through, Big Money and Big Oil can always talk louder than the voice of reason. Try getting a story in to a national magazine. It was refreshing feeling the cold rain, but nobody was there.
Give me a kiss, I said to the woman in my dreams.
It’s nothing personal, I said, I’m just freezing.
Nothing ever is. She said.
In the morning the barrio was very quiet, as if all its human misery, sirens, screams and violent actors had been frozen in place. I woke up sick, remembering what it was like just getting here, as a child, unable to move anything, not even intention. And now we can do things, talk to people, move things around, make changes. Can’t we? I made a special trip down to the Gem show to talk to Kent and get his estimate of what Rick’s tools were worth. I was in a pissy mood, and determined to take it just as far as I could.
Death is just around the corner. Nothing matters anymore. Don’t you understand that?
I said to nobody as I stood in the cold all day, sorting wrenches on the tailgate, watching the storm clouds roll out of the valley, and thinking about the back of JFK’s head getting blown off, the first time we knew nothing good can happen in this world without something dark and broken inside all of us also getting its due.
Party bigwig Chuck Schumer was on TV the other night saying for the sake of party unity we “might” have to ignore the popular vote. Now the radio was saying it looked like Obama would lose Texas big time.
If only he could sweep Texas.
You can’t sweep Texas, "It’s too sorry!" my sister used to say, when she had the brains left to say anything. Or more simply, it’s too full of bullshit, or I’M sorry, the DISTANCES of “the unlikely story that is America”, the vast spaces that seemed to grant people like Bush their half vast sense of entitlement. There is no form of human thought so far that can penetrate much less inform THAT emptiness.
I stared at the grease inside the sockets I was putting on metal stringers like it was a personal archeological find, as I thought about the bitter battles I’d had with them, against the junky vehicles I’d used them on. If I could just get everything arranged just right, I wouldn’t mind going back to work….ha ha.
And if he does sweep Texas, it will be because once again the age will be handed the kind of shit that it demanded. There’s nothing of substance in Obama, just slogans.
Yeah…if you could like anybody who could command that big a demographic, it would mean you’re stupid wouldn’t it?
It means women will bare their breasts and everything else for power. You could see it at Zaire when Muhammed Ali fought George Foreman there. You could see it in Mbutu, exactly the kind of dictator the spirit of that people demanded, like the excesses of the Russian Revolution demanded Stalin…
The way post WW II U.S. housing and baby booms demanded Bay of Pigs, demanded the mob hit of 63, and Fear Of Communism, the fear that some other crook might take our ill gotten gains, demanded we shore up Pinochet in Argentina, and Posada in almost every counter revolution in Latin America, Reagan and the Contras and Granada, JHW Bush in Panama, and Iraq #1, the CIA and its “economic hit men”, Kissinger’s “economic imperative” , Nicaraugua, Guatemala, School Of The Americas, and Big Oil, and Vietnam and Iraq 2 and millions of vets coming home, the backs of their skulls blown off by absurdity
Obama’s speech to AIPAC and the speech about global warming…a betrayal…
Yeah…yeah… he shoulda told them what a buncha whiney chauvinist, professional victims they were, that woulda REALLY helped him get past the prejudice that he's a Muslim wouldn’t it? And he shoulda told us all we were already past the tipping point, and there was no hope. That woulda been real uplifting and unifying wouldn’t it?
And his bill to put private contractors under U.S. law, he just let that languish and said he couldn’t rule out the use of Blackwater, Triple Canopy, KBR/Halliburton, DynCorp, Erinys …to guard our embassy….for the foreseeable future…so where’s the hope in that?
On the other hand, Hillary hasn’t even STARTED to deal with it. And on the other hand I got a Robo call the night before from Clinton headquarters saying I’d lose my social security if I voted for Barack. I guess I must have suddenly landed in “the old and scared” demographic. And I get letter after letter from feminists asking,

"How did a historic breakthrough moment become marred by having to choose between 'race cards' and 'gender cards?'"
Sorry, sometimes I forget nothing else matters besides your issues, your childhood hurts. Maybe sometimes you forget words are birds without wings or feathers. They spend their entire lives in the chasms between us. Sometimes on a dark night with no moon you can hear their faint cries….
And they say we need a woman president, because she’ll think different.
But she DOESN’T think different. She thinks like a man. She says no dialogue with Cuba or Akmadinijad, or Kim Il Jung, no consensus building so the U.N. can have half a chance of doing its part. All her experience goes to listening to Big Money and Big Oil talk to her like she was a man so this insane war can go on killing women and children in another country. She earned a million for sitting on the board of Walmart. She says she’ll keep her relationship with J. Mack of Morgan Stanley, and keep on taking money from lobbyists because “they represent real Americans”. And Bill’s got his pals, like fugitive billionaire Marc Rich, for whose sake AIM activist Leonard Peltier will rot in prison the rest of his life. It’s Obama who’s makin like a woman.

And they say if I don’t want to vote for Hillary it’s because I’m scared to have a woman president. Scared I might feel castrated. Thanks ladies, nice to have your help, so I don’t have to think too much. Or feel castrated.

But tell you what, let’s give Barack a sex change operation….

DING! DING! DING! TRIPLE VICTIMHOOD! BONUS POINTS! EVERYBODY WINS! A black, gay, bi, transgender, woman president! Satisfied, Gloria Steinem? Or jealous? And Hillary can get a tattoo all over her face and work with Aunt Jemima by her side. FULL HOUSE! ALL THE CARDS ON THE TABLE! TEXAS FOLD ‘EM! RAISE YOUR HANDS AND STEP AWAY FROM THE TABLE PLEASE!

Why’re you so bitter?

Just my personal problem. Far as I’m concerned for all the reasons Ruth Bader Ginsberg will always be one of my heroes, Billary to me, like a lot of political marriages, is just another two headed scumbucket. But that’s probably because I’m just so stupid and wrapped up in myself I can’t hear you. I wouldn’t give it a moment’s thought. I can’t even tell you, the thing you might be missing in all this is words don’t mean shit. Follow the money, and as Lincoln Steffens proved in city after city in the thirties and forties, you’ll find big business connected to organized crime, connected to government, like the leg bone necktid to the thigh bone…and a sex change doesn’t change that.
Meanwhile WE live our lives and work ourselves to early graves like ants and bees and ciphers, while patriotic idiots scream at us on the radio. And torture and assassinations and death squad raids are carried out in our name in the third world mostly for the sake of oil. Oil in our shoes, oil in our wedding cakes, oil in our mouths, masked with tons of sugar and chocolate.
Does that oil taste good? And tell me, que es mas macho? Oil or Blood?
Who’s gonna fix it? Obama? He’s just a preacher.
NOW who’s being general? But he’s got over a million private donors. Maybe when the big boys come to him for payback he can tell them,
“Sorry, I don’t need you anymore. I have over a million small donations from people who DON’T represent real Americans. They happen to BE real Americans.”
And they’d just say,
“We wish you luck. We hope nothing happens to you, but we’re worried about your health.”
Just like they said it to every democratically elected president of every third world country that wouldn’t go along with United Fruit, Exxon, private contracting companies ruling whole small countries in Latin America, usurious CIA sponsored infrastructure loans, and all the rest of Kissinger’s “Economic Imperative” and the globalized armies of thugs it hired. And an aide gets handed “a tape recorder” as the new president gets on the plane, and there’s another unverifiable rumor of an explosion, another “mysterious” crash, and an investigation that turns up nothing.
But I need to believe in something. I can’t work without hope. Hope for the unlikely story and the lost cause that America has always been.
What’s happened to you? You always used to say,
Hope springs infernal.
Well, I changed my mind. I’m feeling weak and helpless. So sue me.
NOBODY…CAN…HEAR…YOU…DON'T…YOU…UNDERSTAND?
Yeah, I get it, do you?
When it got dark, I just needed someplace to go, but not far, so I drove to Albertson’s just for the feeling of getting somewhere. I noticed the guy in the white van all loaded with crap WASN'T there that night. WASN’T sitting in HIS SPACE on the bench, reading magazines, his big trembling, weathered hands pawing through the babes in the fashion section of the INSANE story that is America which, we have to keep reminding ourselves, ALL springs from the same soil, which comes from someplace beyond the stars.
The universe is at least 98% nothing. And we come from that nothing. So what is there to say?
I said.
As I carried my veggies out to the truck and drove away listening to some pretty inventive blues with those same old unutterably stupid sexual lyrics attached. But they got me on the road.
I passed the cliff where, that afternoon, coming back from a seven mile construction detour on I-10, I saw this big, tall, half naked, crazy man, pushing his shopping cart in the wind. That night his absence really spoke to me. For years I'd seen him coming down from the hills now and then where he had a cave or some kind of shelter, long suntanned arms flailing in the sun, as he talked to the traffic and his demons, going over and over the same ruts, year after year, in his damaged brain. Flailing and flailing like the ripped ribbons of his shirt in the wind. As if to say,
Don't you understand? DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?
Yes. Yes I do. I said.

SOMETIMES I TAKE A FOOL NOTION....

(“…to jump in the river and drown.” “Goodnight Irene” by Huddie Ledbetter)



"The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude."

-George Orwell, Why I Write, 1946 essay.

"We were so easy to deceive /

We were so easy to control /

We didn't even know there is

a war."

-Leonard Cohen, There Is A War.





It had been a day full of disappointment and fear. It was hot, even for Tucson in February. The woman at the home for homeless vets at Davis Monthan Air Force Base called and said they couldn’t help me with my idea to use the equipment one of their clients had left in the garage I managed for the family trust, (that takes care of my sister who has schizophrenia) to start a woodshop.



So those guys could do something besides sit around, tell war stories and make each other even more depressed.



I thought, but no, not even that, not even close.



Made too much sense. I said, as I pulled into the parking lot of Casa De Los Ninos thrift store. As I walked in, I called Obama Headquarters to tell anybody I could get hold of that I felt betrayed by and disappointed in him. I was upset about statements I read in a thread on Current.com about his ties to Exelon, nuclear power, liquid coal, crop based (instead of smokestack algae based) biofuels, pharmaceuticals, and the pro Israel lobby/pac, AIPAC and a vote against credit card interest caps. Turns out that was information planted by the Clinton machine. The woman who answered said they were prohibited by law from taking donations over $2000. The staff there couldn’t even take donations of coffee from Starbucks for fear that would be used against them. Exelon did hammer him enough on his bill to require full disclosure for any nuclear accident of any size, that the final bill ended up as a suggestion rather than a requirement but the clincher was Hillary voted FOR that bill. He had made statements that Israel’s right to exist should be recognized but it was more complicated than that. She asked me to read Michael Lerner’s essay: “Obama’s Jewish Problem” at



http://warincontext.org/2008/02/02/campaign-08-obamas-appeal-and-his-jewish-problem/#comment-1266



and Robert Cohen’s, No Manchurian Candidate at:



http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/10/opinion/edcohen.php?page=2



She was obviously just a volunteer, just out of college, pleasant, personable with a husky lilt and laugh in her voice that promised more than I’d ever known or for shit sure would ever see delivered. But the falseness in THAT hope was my own damn dumb fault. I said I was also disappointed in his apparent lack of understanding about the nature of global warming feedback loops, that according to the testimony of scientist after scientist on the McCain Committee, could aggressively continue expanding themselves and each other like compound interest on existing CO2 while he talked the usual bureaucratic blather about decreasing an increase in emissions by 80% by 2050 and wasn’t even factoring in population growth. Then she really blew me away. She said she’d taken climatology and ecology in college and she agreed with me. I said,



You’re the first person I’ve talked to who’s said that. But…knowing we may not even see 2020 much less 2050, how do you handle it?



I don’t mean this maliciously but if we do go under that way, maybe we deserve it. Just in the sense that we weren’t intelligent enough to survive.



But just thinking that all of human history and art and culture could disappear?



Some new form of consciousness will arise.



Holy shit. I thought, as if to prove her point, that was exactly what I’d been thinking the past twenty years, that nature had already demonstrated a capability of creating innumerable intelligences, equal to or greater than our own….which, as in the present instance, wasn’t a hard bar to get over. Like the law of conservation of energy, nothing really lost. “Nothing,” as Allen Ginsberg said to Bob McNamara, “that would change anybody’s ultimate form of being.” But there wasn’t time to go into that. I should have just told her how beautiful I found her, but I said,



No, I mean, how do you handle it personally?



And she just laughed. And we talked a little longer about possibilities I’d thought of: we could restore the lost reflectance of melting ice with photovoltaic panels, could dig a canal from the Bay of Mexico to the Salton Sea and the Baja and use the rising ocean waters for shrimp farms full of oil rich grass, could make green buildings here and abroad, with good loans to the third world that would replace the CIA’s cor-pork-racy and “Economic Hit Men” with affordable loans for sustainable agriculture and infrastructure. We could invest in Mexico’s and Palestine’s farming communities instead of fences. Yeah we could do wonders and eat rotten cucumbers as we used to say in high school. And then she said,



The incoming calls are piling up. I’m going to have to let you go.



I tried to tell her what a pleasure it had been talking to her, but it came out as just another pleasantry. I felt that old big time ache inside that told me I was going to have to let HER go.



Ah god, I said to the cold, lonely darkness gathering inside me, haven’t I seen her hundreds of times before? WHY does she always come along at the wrong place and the wrong time?



And her voice echoed,



SOME NEW FORM OF CONSCIOUSNESS…..



I finished buying the backpacks I was going to use to carry tools and supplies up onto the roofs in the coming dog days. At last I’d gotten an opportunity, proven myself enough to one restaurant owner, that he was allowing me to install heat reclaim from his ice machine to his water heater. At last I had hope of doing something meaningful for the environment in this filthy business I’d been trapped in most of my adult life. But hope was hurting and scaring me, so I was taking a break that afternoon. I walked out, past the boom trucks in the parking lot loaded with salvage A/C units, into the junkyard in back of the thrift store, where the rejects sat waiting for a slow death in the merciless Arizona sun. I looked up at the cloud spotted peaks of the Catalinas and said to myself,



Yeah. I have no voice, no hands to touch, no feet to walk anywhere with, there’s not even a “me” worth talking about. Nothing here but the mountains. I’m almost glad I know that.



There was a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue on some shelves. I picked it up and sat down on the top shelf, which broke and sent me sprawling like a clown.



Pressed wood. Formaldehyde based crap.



I said as I sat on a table and opened the magazine again, just to see what else I’d been missing for so long it seemed normal.



Inside there were touched up and pimped out babes with grains of sand clinging to their photoshopped skin, posed, self consciously, stupidly, in front of everything we were destroying with every abstract and concrete lust we could muster: a twilight desert, snow capped mountains, the ocean, baby seals, walruses, glaciers, everything, even this ultimate obscenity: the Masai.



Jesus fucking Christ.



I said,



You just can’t let ANYTHING alone can you? Everything, especially every proud and noble native culture, MUST be defiled and broken.



And I heard her voice echoing,



SOME OTHER FORM OF CONSCIOUSNESS…



Before which I was nothing but a game.

HOPE IS A HURTIN THANG

I finished the installation of the tankless water heater for Sushi Garden. It was intimidating but it wasn’t hard.

Who’s that?

I asked the old man in the mirror door, who just said,

Who’s that?

Right back at me, the pitiful sap, all his years, commandeered to the service of a group ego with a mobster’s sense of honor. As the typical woman led her typical boyfriend in to the secret door & he followed not for anything inside the restaurant but in not so secret hopes of getting to the promised land later on that night in bed.

Plumbing’s not my favorite game, so I did have to call Gene a few times to ask questions about code. He just laughed, nothing to worry about.

You and me, Gene.

I said, we won’t ever get the girl, not in this stupid movie. Not for all your nights crawling through attics and below floors, a light on your forehead, like a misshapen, ungainly, toothless angel, or your rainy days jackhammering through asphalt and concrete to run a water line for a poor ol widder woman. The most beauty we’ll ever hold in our hands is the mechanical excellence of the Cummins diesel in your big dually bread truck with parts and supplies neatly stocked like military secrets on walk-in racks and in filing cabinets.

So that’s done. I said to myself. Now don’t you dare tell me it was nothing, after all the complaining and whining you did, o I can’t do it, I just can’t do this... don’t say shit

and myself said, just shut the F up,

To the sinking, queasy sensation in my gut as I called Rick at the homeless vets’ center.

I can’t talk to him, I’m not a shrink, I don’t know what to say to a clinically depressed man.

It wasn’t Rick, it was someone sounding even more depressed.

What the hell kind of sense does that make?

I wondered,

To let these guys associate with each other? Drag each other down?

Is Rick there?

Yeah, just a minute.

The voice dragged the words out forever.

Can I pick you up so we can go take a look at the stuff in the garage?

Well if you’re sure you want to.

My thing is take a look at the situation and then decide what the options are.

Well OK.

He sounded really bad off. This wasn’t going to be a good trip, I thought.

How far behind in rent are we?

6 months. That’s 900 dollars.

Have you broached the idea to the center that they could use the equipment to start a woodworking shop there?

No. It’s Saturday, there’s no staff here.

Well I’m just concerned about how I can reimburse the family trust.

Yes I understand.

Well can we just go take a look at what’s there and then decide what to do?

Yeah, I guess.

He said the equipment wasn’t in good shape and needed assembly. I wondered how much his depression was clouding his judgment.

He’d disappeared many times before and always came back and paid up. But this time he said he left town “intending to end it all” but “couldn’t go through with it”. It is a hard thing, those times in your life when you realize how alone we all are. The good news and the bad news is it’s nothing personal, even when both parties think it is. I was thinking about times in my life when it would have been so easy to fall into that hole he was in, and wondering if I would get dragged down THIS TIME into his hole…and you fall and fall thinking any minute you’re going to find the bottom, the answer. O yeah, haven’t we all been there on that bipolar roller coaster ride to nowhere? I asked myself as I drove down that long twilight line of red taillights strung out to the airplane boneyard at Davis Monthan Air Force Base. Is this where we’re all going?

He came walking up out of the darkness, a figure in tan clothes with white hair, his face had gotten fatter from the drugs, stood staring at the truck, slowly reached up to the door handle, and got in and stared at the dashboard awhile.

Kind of hypnotizing, these LEDs

They’re not. Just kids’ sneakers I cut the tops off of. They have those stars in them that flash whenever you take another step. Just stuff to keep me awake driving from job to job late at night. I tried to get all bobble head toys but only ended up with three.

Where’d you get them?

Charley, the crackhead, left them in the storage shed & finally said just take everything out for the rent owed the trust and send him a few things he really needed. He had enough toys in there a hundred kids couldn’t have played with them all. It’s funny.

He didn’t think anything was funny.

I said, When were you in the Service?

In the 80s, when it wasn’t very popular.

Did you see any action?

No, just once we found a boat with 80 Vietnamese refugees trying to get to America in a boat built for 20. We left them off at the next port. I’m sure they just found another boat. Then near the Panama Canal we heard about an uprising in Guatemala…

Oh the arms for hostages thing…

No before that. Just the beginning. Our sister ship got an emergency call and peeled off to go back to Vietnam. That’s all the action I ever saw.

You get a pension?

No, just the care at the home.

What about the Harley?

I’m behind on payments on that too. I need to call the bank and tell them to just go pick it up.

Lotta people in that same boat. The house next door to me was built by two partners and got taken over by the bank. Guess they couldn’t pay the loan. It hasn’t rented and hasn’t sold in over a year. There’s some bad times ahead.

Yeah.

When we got there he walked in real slow like someone wading through floodwaters. He’d built a loft in the back. A 2 X 8 had cracked in the middle on a knot and all fifteen feet of it was sagging under the weight of years of storage. I grabbed a piece of angle iron from a bed frame and asked him to hold it on the beam while I hammered the bottom until it was plumb. The equipment was all heavy duty Delco, a band saw, contractor’s table saw, bench saw, drill press, joiner….the bed on this was rusty but the blades felt sharp.

I don’t think it will run.

Why not?

Been sitting too long.

Don’t see why that should matter. Why don’t we try it?

No outlets.

There’s one.

They’re not hooked up.

Just a few wires. Here let me get my tools.
Yeah we got power. Try it.

I’d like to have an electrician to check out the continuity on the motor.

You got one. Try it.

I saw a flash.

We still have power. Probably just a tiny wire touching another one. It’s gone now.

Stand back. OK I’m satisfied it runs…

Don’t you want to try it with a board?

No I don’t need to lose any fingers tonight. O alright.

He held the piece of dark maple in his hands and sighted down it, and then slowly adjusted the bed on the jointer.

God, I thought, he’s like me when I have those feelings that I can’t do anything, and just have to fight my way to competence one tiny battle at a time. What a crying shame to lose all that expertise and experience to a tiny imbalance in a few neurotransmitters.

It’s more than that you idiot and even you know better. There’s something going on here.

But I’m not a shrink.

Yeah you said that, so….?

He ran the board through and then said the tiny variations on the cut meant the blades had to be sharpened.

Not necessarily. What about the rust on the bed? As you dragged the board across it, I saw it jerking a little.

Yeah, guess you’re right.

Looks pretty good to me.

I shoulda had you here before.

There was a yearbook like a high school yearbook from his ship, The Roanoak. He thumbed listlessly through the water stained and wrinkled pages.

Babes.

I said seeing the pictures of women in bathing suits in the South Pacific. Oh they were FAR AWAY alright.

He put the book down abruptly, like he was discarding it. I watched as he looked at the new computer and then started putting clothes on it, sticking a shirt on it, then a pair of pants, like he was dressing it for bed, and then did the same with the flat screen monitor. I knew he was thinking about taking it. I let him choose whether he would or would leave it to be part of the sale.

I saw a little bronze sculpture next to a Japanese sword. It looked like one man carrying another on his back, but looking closer it was a statue of the many armed and legged Hindu dancing goddess.

Did you learn to use that sword?

Yeah. In Kung Fu.

Did you study Buddhism?

A little. In martial arts. It makes sense to me.

Yeah. Me too.

On the way back I talked about my sister’s history starting from age 11 when she was taken to El Paso and got electro shock. It wasn’t as bad as in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest I said. They knew they were exaggerating in that movie but it wouldn’t have been much of a show if they didn’t ham it up a little. Sometimes I almost like Jack Nicholson when he’s playing somebody besides himself. It’s like Mark Twain said, “Be yourself is the worst advice you can give some people.”

He laughed, a little.

I actually liked him once, in “The Missouri Breaks”.

It’s been a long time since I saw that. What was it about?

It was about insanity. And Marlon Brando was really insane in it. It was a surreal Western. I liked it because there were no good guys, kind of like life, without the boredom.

You been following the election?

Riveted to it.

Really?

It’s high drama. Edwards withholding his delegates out of pride like Achilles, like: "Only I can speak for the working man." What did Hillary offer him in that secret meeting? Something to help him swallow his pride? Is Obama just another pretty face and a bunch of slogans? Is Hillary all corruption? Does the machine win, or the populist? What will the insurance companies do to our health care? I don’t like her waffling. I don’t like Obama’s lack of specifics but nobody owns him yet. But whatever you think there hasn’t been a time in history when people were this excited about an election. It’s good that we’re having a real debate.

At least it’s not as divisive as last time.

The conflict last time was between red and blue states. And between Diebold and Democracy. This time it’s war inside the parties. People are going to find it hard to close ranks after all this bitter squabbling. Every week there’s a new upset, a new block of voters saying, “Not so fast! It’s still a real contest.”

They say Obama isn’t really saying anything, but he’s saying end tax breaks for corporations, the health insurance companies get a seat at the table but they don’t get to buy the whole table, free this nation from the tyranny of oil, bring the planet back from the point of no return. Robert DeNiro says “he doesn’t have enough experience” to let corporate lobbyists run Washington. That’s general, and maybe it’s nothing, but he’s getting the young involved. And I think they’ll keep on inspiring him, like the innocence of children, to do more and do better.

Yeah. He said.

I take it personally, I said, because there was a time in my life when I wasn’t clinically depressed but I was pretty much a sad sack. Sometimes in those times it seemed like the mass media spoke to me like it was the I Ching. I was standing in the checkout line at the grocery store and a voice in my head said why not check out the Cosmopolitan? Naah, there’s never anything in there, just a buncha twits looking at their new clothes. Try it. No. TRY IT! So I looked inside and there was an article by a psychiatrist about the healing power of memory. And I’d just seen a movie on that same theme: “Return To Paradise”. And later that night there was a book about wilderness survival in the book rack. I opened it up and there was a story about a man who was lost in the woods and died, not for lack of food, water or fuel, but because he ran out of hope. I went across the street and ate at this Chinese Restaurant and my fortune cookie that night said, “He who has hope has everything”. Quite a string of coincidences. But I just took whatever felt true and used it. But this video that’s going around, “Yes We Can”. They can say it’s shallow, because anybody can say anything, but

But that’s cynical.

Yeah, but like Obama said, “In the unlikely story that is Ameriica, there has never been anything false about hope.” And that’s a true thing. What else did we ever have except hope and dumb luck to get us through? In the Black Plague, the Dust Bowl….there was a time in WW II when we hadn’t won one naval battle because Yashimoto was a really good admiral, and a squadron of our fighter planes got lost in the clouds and got to the target ship an hour late. But that coincided with the men having put the guns under wraps and gone below to eat and sleep. The planes demolished the ship, and that one accident changed the whole course of the war. Before that it looked like we’d lose. Our marines were hemmed in and just being slaughtered from machine gun fire from the hills overlooking the volcanic ash of Iwo Jima and other islands in the South Pacific. And now according to all logic, the human race stands the chance of a snowball in hell of stopping climate change.

I was talking too much. He was looking at me strangely. I gotta stop preaching…

We shook hands, and he took the personal records and pillows he’d salvaged from storage into the dark house.

What can a person do? I wondered. I went home and tried to listen to the “Yes We Can” video with hate in my heart for big words and pretty people, because they had no place for uglies like me and Rick and Gene in that paradigm. I’m sick of beautiful people with nothing to say I said. Sick of them, y’hear?

But I had the same old flashbacks to the sixties when people put their lives on the line for principle. Will he lose? Will there be millions of embittered, disillusioned people who will never rise to believe again? Will we ever look OUTWARD again, or are we just gonna sink into our health care and social security and our worries about the economy for all the world like a nation of cockroaches with TV sets? Why is there so much injustice? Why can’t I touch that sad man? Who would make the decisions that would give his life meaning? Why can’t I find any clarity? The tears came anyway. Hope, Yes We Can….what else was it that got me through each day’s mundane and impossible battles? It wasn’t shallow. I said. No fool like an old fool I said, and turned on the computer. There were lines from the voting booths in Maine 3 and four blocks long in the snow, people all bundled up looking like wrecked overstuffed chairs, with faces like my face and Gene’s face and Rick’s face, worn down with trials and trying, old and mottled like so many muppets stretched out into the gathering darkness on one long thin thread, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

It was a human thing.

SUPERDUMMY'S LAMENT

(A FAUX CANNON FO' CHRISTMAS)

Night after night kneeling before mechanical altars
Down on my knees before the gears in all my
years turned
to minutes all my moments
Flown, my face grown
old ground
down
to nothing in the interface
Between technology & nature. Every day I go
do or die for Miss America’s right to go
out to eat
And parade her lover, and her meat,
ain’t life sweet
as a mafia soldier, honor bound to negativity
Where you can’t hear nobody pray
Because we’ve always done it this way
And our intentional stupidity has always gotten its payoffs
And defied the laws of gravitas & gravity

God of Grease and Gears in all my years
In whose presence it is sacrilege to speak
Especially of love, millions of official murders prove
life is cheap but no easier to let go of.
I’ve been your soldier, in the dance
of insignificance have made my bones
on the air, the trees and the sky for you
you know I love you like a brother
Why do you have to hurt me? Now
The whole world is broken
Automan has spoken.
People tell me they can’t afford to save any more money
This year, can’t stop chopping wood long enough
To build a better stove, recoup or reprise
The miles they drove, can’t afford solar, wind
Or geothermal, the pundits don’t have time
For smokestack algae biodiesel

Cold rain falling on the roof of the Sushi Garden
Where I kneel down NOT
to pray
But to put in a relay, at the end of the day
I got nothin to say, I'm in over my head,
just take off my tights
and cape and crawl into bed pull the covers up
above my dread.
I give it my all and the faces of want want more
Cold rain falling as I drive down the string of city lights
I once walked in a personal ritual
I hear the roar of a distant ocean in the traffic
Pull in the vacant road by Old Times Café
A flash of antique farm equipment
Glows enshrined
And warm with rust in the headlights
Grim reminder of endless progress
And things somehow staying the same
And no one but ourselves to blame
Feel the comforting tractor throb of the diesel engine
Its lights turned on the burned mess
Of a condensing unit that had an electrical fire
If we’re all in this together, why am I somehow
Still always all alone?
I throw up my hands and go home

Kneeling before mechanical altars
The voice of reason falters,
A tale at once too horrific and banal
For Barbara Walters. Nobody asked me,
Nobody begs the question, why do I still have to ask it?
Why are we doing this, where are we going
And why am I in this handbasket?
For love or for bagels and lox
Why am I in this Skinner Box?
Ships dragging the oceans for heavy metal contaminated fish
Engines gobbling fuel thousands of miles to put them on a plane
And fly them packed in dry ice more thousands of miles
To be refrigerated so people can drive to sit in air conditioned
Over lit spaces and feel like they’re eating natural and organic
While down below or up above the mechanic
Kneels, weeps and curses
Whatever gods may be that chose to put him on the Titanic
He once had dreams of being an artist, a gardener,
A craftsman, didn’t we all
Before the throw of the dice
Before the fall?

Kneeling before mechanical altars
A good soldier in a bad war
whispers:

“DON’T
The fools know the more of them
And the more they play he game the less
Of us there are?”

While he works
for people he loves
While he knows
they’re jerks, o brave new world
& such beautiful technology
transcendant independent of biology an embarrassment
of riches, he says,

“DON’T
the sonsabitches
ever think this time the ship may sink BECAUSE
the ice is melting?”

And then he tells himself:

“It’s not as bad as you think it is
It’s not as good as you think it is.
The whole shit’n deal
Has nothin to do with what you feel
My country tiz of show biz it
just is maybe
dumb luck will get us thru
Say it often enough maybe that’ll
Make it true

Silence is golden logic is not, life is hell
We tell
The truth the way the words lie
Votes are being stolen big wheels are rollin
Over nature’s largess you can kiss your ass
and all the space there is
in our time goodbye
we’re doing the denial dance
spending our children’s inheritance
I must be dreaming
while I work I hear people screaming
in secret prisons I want
to help them but I can’t seem to get out of mine
The government says it’s all for good reasons
Give us your rights and just go shopping
Now & then or else
The terrorists win the machinery of our love
is loud by day, by nite
fall my ears are ringing now is the
hour the lust for
power
Is just a silly song we can’t stop singing

My Life As A Crimefighter

I was born in 1982, at a very early age, as my mother, Viola's response to a nationwide shortage of stupidty. While still a small caped crusader in tights I was bitten by a radioactive accountant which shorted out all the brain cells that would normally have calculated my enlightened self interest and left me with no other career choice than serving other people, and worse yet, trying to save them from themselves. As a teenager, with the help of an alchoholic high school guidance counselor, I decided to become a superhero citizen artist social worker and earn fame and fortune fighting crime and injustice in the big city.

As I said I was born in response to a nationwide shortage of stupidity. It was back in the eighties when everybody knew everything and brains kept bumping into other brains. "Voila!" said Viola, "Enter Superdummy STAGE LEFT!", a Super Hero with a Pooh Bear size brain so he could at least get thru the crowd, not seem out of place on stupid talk shows, not be noticed at rich people's parties or their political confabs, do stupid performance art stunts, be so stupid he could't be degraded by any context, not even press conferences, WHATAGUY, where is he, anyway? Silly, skinny, almost invisible ...until at just the right moment.....ALLAKAZAM BLAM ZOWIEEE! WHAM! ZOCK! POW! THUD! OOOPS! Looks like he crashed into the wrong building and rescued the wrong goo goo eyed blushing young librarian again. Will there be lawsuits? Sure. But hey! It's the price of glory! It's what life in the fast lane is all about....ask OJ, ask Jeffrey Dahmer, ask Condi Rice, ask Godzilla----do I ever get the girl? Are you kidding? I know I am.

So looking at the national and world scene what's a nice guy like SuperDummy doing in a grade B plot like this? He was the only guy dumb enough to apply for the job. What job? Combatting the politics of FEAR and NARCISSM: 9/11 lookatme, lookatme, I'm a war president, lookatme, 9/11 9/11 lookatmet gonna have to raise the price of oil and suspend civil liberties, lookatme, did I mention 9/11? Happened just as if we planned it that way, SCRATCH THAT! Combatting climate change would be bad for the economy, then the evil doers would win. 9/11, 9/11....

THEN Narcissus turns media whore, designs self conscious clothes, makes endless speeches and bad movies and then shoots up the classroom. But who gave him his broken mirror? So now I gotta also fight DREAD. NAUSEA, ANOMIE, ANXIETY, SIDE EFFECTS, MALL SALES AND THAT TIRED, ACHEY FEELING....but who else can always be there for you to plant the SEEDS OF HOPE in DESPAIR?

"Inspector Jergens, this looks like a job for...." (OK, all together now, boys and girls....)

S U U U P E RRRRRRRRRR DUMMMMEEEEEEEEE!!!!

THIS IS MY LETTER TO THE WORLD

(by SuperDummy




This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,--
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.

Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!



---Emily Dickenson---



Hey dudes & dudettes,



I guess they think I'm as dumb as I look. Diebold took my vote, the talk shows took my voice. I think they call them talk shows because they can't listen. Rupert took my newspapers. Big Oil took my paycheck. Big money's got my ass in debt till I die, the Economic Hit Man took my foreign policy. And then Clarence Thomas put a pubic hair in my constitution. And I'm sitting here like a superhero on a log listening to the news and the UN's committee on climate change says CO2's increased 35% more than the scientists predicted this year. Like, duh! Computers been underestimating greenhouse stuff by 100% to 500% the past fifty years and before that they said, global warming? What global warming? Now they tell me we're close to the tipping point where global warming accelerates faster & faster and can't be reversed. So does that mean we're already past the tipping point? What color emergency is that, and what am I supposed to do....uh lessee, make like a Hollywood B movie and DRIVE out of it? Yeah, drive faster, Superdummy, hell ain't half full. I listen to the scientists on C & N tell Senator McCain a feedback loop is like: the ice melts, the sun doesn't get reflected, the ground heats up, the ocean gets warmer, plankton die, give off more CO2 which holds more heat, and it goes on & on, like, the hotter it gets, the faster it can get hotter. And then the oceans boil and it's like Venus, 800 degrees in the shade except there isn't any shade. Well hey, it's not like it was the end of the world! OKAYYYY!? OKAYYYYY!?



Then Al Gore talks about reducing the greenhouse gases we're emitting by 80% by 2050. What's that supposed to do? And what about population growth? If cars can get twice as many miles per gallon and we have three times as many cars, are we making progress? SO...which of us is insane? And what can I do? If the guy's right who said, to choose is to live, the choices the little guy gets these days, I might as well be dead.



I FEEL like I'm dead. I read about amazing new inventions, CO2 absorbers, thin film photovoltaics, electric cars, "smokestack algae biofuels"....companies are already growing algae which take 35% of the smokestack CO2 and make biodiesel and ethanol from it and you don't need farmland, or tractors or fertilizers or pesticides and you don't have to haul the stuff because the plants are scattered out. I call the Troubleshooter Show, the Ed Schultz show, even NPR Science Friday. No answer or sorry no unerstan english. The pundits go on yammering about corn and switchgrass and the gummint goes on pouring billions into oil and oil wars. I write my rep or the newspaper and get a form letter. People are protesting and getting gassed in the streets, and who's listening even to them? Am I dead, or is this one of those dreams where you open your mouth to scream but no sound comes out?



I got a truck that ran on ethanol. That was OK but biodiesel was cleaner in the big picture. So I got two trucks that run on biodiesel. Then I bought the equipment to run straight vegetable oil or waste vegetable oil because that eliminates the processing. The daily grind won't let me install it yet, but maybe someday. At least now when the pump opens its mouth to swallow my Working Assets credit card Big Oil and Big War and that clown in the president's chair get less and green business gets more. When I get another call on a walk-in freezer that's down and I gotta go do or die for Miss America's right to go out to eat, at least some of the money I pay Working Assets to use my cell phone goes to green businesses and doesn't go to Verizon's union busting, invasions of privacy, and red state republican ecological nastiness. HELLO! VERIZON? CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW!? Nope, they still send me kissey huggey love letters offering me more discounts. What do I have to do to make them understand, it's not about the money. That's THEIR deal. I say give em the goddam money, the money's not important. Like dude! Just give us back our EARTH. Sorry, you're gonna haveta talk louder than that Superdummy, can't hear you. Or whyncha just faggedabout your precious little crusade to save people from themselves?



Yeah OK I'm a dummy. I didn't stop there. I signed up with CitizenReThinkReNu so they could put solar panels on my roof and become my power company for 1 to 25 years. They said I'd save money because they'd lock in my present rate, but I figure Big Oil will conspire to keep the price of oil competitive, and anyway the loss of the use of my $500 deposit (of course I get it back but) is gonna be hard to offset. Yeah it's stupid. Looks like we're gonna burn up anyway, and it's just gonna cost me a little extra to put some expensive shade on my roof, but it's the right thing to do, and don't worry bout me, my lack of brain cells just makes me happier anyhow. And the little guy shouldn't forget the little things, so I changed the lightbulbs, got energy efficent appliances, bought organic local produce, grew sprouts, got a hand crank wheatgrass juicer and wheatgrass grow kit online and also buy flats of wheatgrass when I don't have time and trim them just right so a few of them are still growing while I'm juicing the latest one. Somebody's bound to notice that. Sure. Like another fart in hell!

There’s another feedback loop to start by NOT contributing to (NOT voting your $$$ on)

(Would that be a negative or a positive feedback loop? I’m confused.)

Rush sponsors:

http://www.takebackthemedia.com/rushbusted.html

Hannity Sponsors:

http://www.newshounds.us/2006/03/21/whats_the_matter_with_sean_hannity_and_what_you_can_do_about_it.php

Media Matters action center:

http://mediamatters.org/action_center/
http://mediamatters.org/users/sign_up?source=banner_200406150009

analyze this bilge:

http://radioequalizer.blogspot.com/2007/10/clear-channel-responds-to-rush-protest.html

Or join Rep. Henry Waxman and “Battleground Democrats” at:
http://www.houstondemocrats.com/archives/2006/09/join_batttlegro.html

Yeah I'm voting by giving or withholding my money and it at least counts a little in the other direction now, but the number crunchers can't see anything except Big Money and they can't watch that past the quarterly earnings report. And the feedback loops can't hear me until we at least get back to Piltdown Man levels of greenhouse gasses. I'm still opening my mouth but no sound comes out. Then I ask myself, what if there was a letter? A letter that lists these choices, and gets other choices added to it, and it gets sent to your friends and they send it to their friends and it just goes on and on like Voyager thru cyberspace? Pretty soon the number crunchers start to notice. A beautiful green feedback loop starts to balance the destructive feedback loops of global warming. And by the time it cuts the economic legs out from under the Iraq war, it'll be Exxon, Halliburton and Darth Vader Jr. instead of the rest of us not noticing until it's too late. .Get enough numbers together and even the idiots controlling the media will have to report both on the direness of the emergency and the brilliant remedies they've so far ignored. All it would take is one little letter, the right letter. And that's a real hassle.



I can't write that letter. I'm too stupid, remember? And I got too many scruples. I can't say, send this letter on because if you do, good things will happen to you and if you don't, bad things will happen to you. I can't say that because I don't know that. If I was a smart politician I could, but if I was that smart I wouldn't have to work for a living at this soul sucking job. But maybe until we find the smartypants who CAN write the letter, we could send this one out instead? And someday maybe hundreds of versions would be going out, all together screaming, HELLO! CAN YOU HEAR US NOW!? And then KA POW! GA ZING! ZONK! THRASH! SMANG! WHACKO! the money changers are thrown out of the bar on their butts!



O sure, Superdummy, you say, but if it's already too late, why bother? Why not just blow everything on one big party? Ever hear that old saying, "Anything done long enough becomes agony?" And did you ever ask yourself if parties are really all that much fun? I knew a woman who dreamed she was at a party having a blast and some people in another room were whispering,



"It still hurts."



Pain is one of the few real things left. So I choose to be awake thru the whole operation.



And I dunno about you but I'm TIRED of working for assholes. If I'm gonna die in a firey holocaust I don't want to go there supporting the idiocy that started the fire in the first place. I'm not THAT dumb yet. I think we were community before we were individuals, and at the end we see what our real community looks like, and the natural community still has everything to say about that. Yeah it could already be too late, but generations before us wondered if they could grow old before the world ended. I think of the Dark Ages, the Black Plague, the random gropings of our flawed & failing founding fathers who had no model for the country they were creating, the Dust Bowl, the times during WW II when it looked like we would lose, and we got by on perseverance, random strokes of genius and dumb luck. And I don't think it's ever possible to say the word DUMB loud enough.



So isn't this the same damn DUMB chance we've always had?



And like we always have to say, FOR NOW, could you send this letter on, (and on) and send the choices you'd like to add back to me at:



http://superdummyinloveandwar.blogspot.com



I’ll collect and send them on…….(and on)



C/O



Yer Old Pal,





Superdummy


COMMENTS: (from Brink.com)



Ideals...

If humanity could see past her vanity, what would she see? The human race is parasitic and needs to be cleansed from the planet, perhaps the universe. It's sad. I've often thought people are better than they are

"The leech's kiss

The squid's embrace

The prurient ape's defiling touch

and do you like the human race

no, not much" -Huxley


Comment by evanidsghost
11/18/2007 @ 11:02 am


Thanks for looking down on the whole world and judging all us poor working stiff's lives & hard times & condemning them. Hope you & Huxley feel better now. Hitler only judged a race, you managed to shitcan a whole species in just a few words. Did somebody die and leave you pope? How do you look through everybody's life and soul throughout history, and say they're nothing but crap, in the face of libraries full of adventures in consiousness and courage in the face of impossible odds? If only Superdummy could be like you, then he wouldn't be just another poor schmuckoid wannabe superhero, he could really be somebody. BUUTTT the poor fool thinks he wants to do something positive, have a plan, start an ANTI global warming feedback loop.....for the children, if no one else, who've done nothing wrong and are just trying to save a little piece of the world from ALL the negative generalities of those who're older and wiser than THEY are....HOPE, PLAN, DO SOMETHING! Ridiculous. Worst possible strategy you can have in an emergency. Far better to be passive, sit around in some Cafe' en ze boulevaaarrrd and GLOWERRRR at ze booobwaughzzheee & die in an orgy of fear & self loathing. I'm with you, man, whaddawe do NEXT!!??


Comment by superdummy
11/19/2007 @ 8:54 am


Yes, or course you're right. It's just that I've involved myself in many campaigns through the years - mostly environmental - and watched the planet steadily deteriorate at an accelerating pace. I guess that's a reason to try harder, not give up. Your optimism and positive attitude is respected and my post was not intended to criticize you in any way. I'm just tired, and frustrated with people - especially my own countrymen/women. BTW: we won a few of those campaigns, so all wasn't lost. The pressure is off some creatures (at least a bit) and people more fully understand the consequences of radiation in the environment (somewhat). Thanks for your efforts. We need more people like you


Comment by evanidsghost
11/20/2007 @ 7:06 am


And YOU are right, my friend. (forgive my presumption, but we do seem to be on the same side in this fight.) Things ARE bad out there. And if we don't want to continue the negative generalities of others in & out of the media we need to look at EXACTLY how bad things are. And we need to look at ALL possible solutions, no matter how strange they may seem at first. Yes, efforts in the past have failed. Jimmy Carter warned us in the 80s that "Energy conservation is the moral equivalent of war." He was right, it will take a WW II type of national/worldwide mobilization). He was laughed at, and in a senseless, negative, symbolic gesture, some idiot named Ronald Regan took down the solar panels Jimmy had installed on the roof of the White House. But there is (always) how bad things are: "Fire!" and then there is our reaction (people trampled & killed all trying to get out of the theater at the same time). How many drivers are killed overreacting to a skid or a sharp turn? A minor mechanical failure yesterday, produced a panic reaction (generalizing, all or nothing thinking) in me, which caused a chain of misfortunes infinitely greater than the original incident. An almost universal principle of therapy, mechanical or spiritual repair: get the information, diagnose the problem, "Just the facts, ma'am.", What happened, how did I react, what was the result, WHY?!, and finally, "It is what it is." No matter what happens we have to LOOK! and (take it out and) look at it--- over and over, until we find the distance that can make us whole. At the risk of overreacting here, sometimes our choices literally do boil down to "Which hill do you want to die on? and: What would you rather die doing?" I believe all our intelligence comes from the intelligence of nature which has created innumerable intelligences equal to, & possibly greater than ours (not a hard bar to get over). (On a good day, I can sometimes even believe that intelligence that created us is all we need to take care of us.) BTW Thank you for your good letter. Because talk helps us. Because we are community before we are individual and our community is part & parcel of the community of nature. I choose to dedicate my life to the service of that community, while recognizing I have a snowball's chance in hell of making a dent in the mass consciousness that has served us so badly in the past. Why else, Inspector Jergens, do you think everybody keeps saying, "This looks like a job for SUPERDUMMY!"?????


Comment by superdummy
11/20/2007 @ 8:50 am