American Pastoral #29

A year and some has passed since my last Pastoral, and in some sense it seems as if nothing has changed, though in truth much has changed.  For the worse. The Trump administration, dogged with endless scandal and corruption, simply doubles down. Mired in a cesspool of moral and ethical offenses and plain old crimes, the nation seems stunned, our political parties paralyzed.  Offense on offense is dumped in the public lap, a myriad of impeachable acts are done and while the air is sour with alarm, almost nothing has happened to confront the new reality.  Yet there is a reason for this stasis, one which curiously is what provokes it.

Starved dead whale in OregonFrom Bette Gordon’s Variety

The ascendancy of Trump, seen by many as an aberration,  a slap in the face to our sense of civil decorum, was in reality simply an unveiling of ourselves.  For decades America has been corrupt and rotted to the core – not just the hard-right business oriented sorts, but our nice soft liberals as well.  On the right the military industrial complex and its endless wars, was encouraged to expand since there was much profit to be made from it, and few raised a complaint.  Now President Eisenhower’s Farewell speech warning has come to full flower, and both Republicans and Democrats genuflect to the military, while civilians pay their taxes and utter “Thank you for your service” while veterans, utterly abandoned after that “service”, commit suicide at such rate that far more have died that way than in combat.

 

On the liberal side the corruption can be seen in universities which have become secondary to their football and basketball teams, where grade inflation and cozy “legacy” admissions warp the fabric of education.  It can be seen in the empty gestures toward “green” behavior, with recycling and hybrid cars and endless feel-good symbolic acts which utterly fail to address the reality that America is a vicious militarist/capitalist system which seizes 25% of the globe’s resources to serve 4.4 % of the world’s population.   To effect any real change requires a drastic down-sizing of American consumption, something which even the most liberal of Americans will not consider. They will say instead that the 25% must simply be more equitably distributed, not that we need to cut back 80% to properly fit our population.  It is a moral corruption no less damning than the rude billionaire’s club of the Republican’s.

Neo-Nazi rally, NCNavy Seal acquitted of murdering Iraqi prisoner

While many “good” Americans abhor Trump, and many others celebrate him, the brutal truth is that he is a symptom, an ugly scab which reveals the broad, deep decadence which has been building in American society for decades, and which while transparently evident for all that time, was discreetly ignored or minimized, as being something which a minority of other people did, and never oneself. Corruption was a flaw of 3rd world places, or Italy or Turkey. It was the kind of lie familiar in totalitarian states in which the official truth is known by all be be false, but has to be accepted for survival.  Americans imagined themselves mystically different but they were not. While the nation built a vast military empire, visible and obvious, everyone paid their taxes, and few protested. The unacknowledged benefits were simply too enticing, and besides, resisting would just be too much bother and risk.

Since the end of World War Two, Americans have lived in a fantasy bubble, perceiving themselves ever as the good guys, the white-hat cowboy come to save the damsel in distress.  After all we’d gone to Europe’s and Asia’s defense, beating the Krauts and the Japs, sacrificing our youth for others.  Our story.  Never mind it was the Soviet Union which sacrificed endlessly more and did the job in Europe, and never mind it was Japanese over-reach which cost them their war.  But for we Americans, nope, it was our glorious GI’s that turned the tide, and won the day. Westerns.  We, in our own minds, come what may, were always the good guys.

John Wayne

As the world slowly pieced itself back together after the conclusion of the war, America was essentially a back-door socialist society, recovered from the Depression-era ravages of capitalism run amok thanks to the WPA, Social Security and myriad other government props deliberately devised to save capitalism from itself.  Coupled with the steroid boost of vast government spending (debt) to conduct the war – factories for building ships, tanks, planes, all constructed on the government dime – the USA emerged as an industrial power-house with virtually no competition. It had all been leveled by the war, save for what was left in the USSR. Entering the ’50’s America propagated its myths to the globe, and to itself.

USA USA USA  #1 #1 #1.

And America, and much of the rest of the world, fell for it.  We were the shining beacon, the city on the hill, the biggest economy, the champion of democracy, the general all-around do-good guys of the 50’s.  Everybody loved us and we loved us. Or at least so we told ourselves.

Charles Sheeler

The fifties cemented America’s self-image as the benign biggest bestest country ever, the melting pot, the energetic inventive nation that had thrown off the shackles of old-world corruptions, tossed the aristocracy on the dung heap of history, and was innocent and pure.  We gave generously to others, developed the Marshall Plan for Europe, and turned Japan into a nation of Peaceniks.

We were a Norman Rockwell painting.

We were, of course, utterly self-deluded, mired in the propaganda we had issued about ourselves to others.  We were the knights riding in on white horses saving the world from the scourge of Nazism and the Yellow Peril.  We wore the white hats, dammit.

I recall in high-school having a final “civics” test which had 100 questions, two of which were the same question phrased differently – it asked why is/was/will be American foreign policy always be formed for the good of the other countries.  I replied it isn’t/wasn’t and wouldn’t be, citing some of the warped history they had taught me – for example, the Spanish-American war, which among other things was the first Gulf of Tonkin trick, to be deployed but a few years later.  I “missed” this question twice, and one other about who wrote the Virginia Bill of Rights.  3 questions of 100.  I was flunked.  As I recall I took the matter to the administration but I don’t remember the result.  The old lady teacher was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

 

Andy WarholRichard Avedon

Danny Lyons

In the 50’s, creeping through the back-door of French colonialism, we took over their role in Indo-China, largely in secret. At the same time we overthrew the elected government of Iran, installing an erstwhile Shah who did our bidding and was duly celebrated as modernizing ancient Persia.  Our fingers were in Africa and Central and South America, propping up useful dictators.  This however did not show up much in the American mind until the 60’s.  Pieces occasionally slipped by the censors, but most of America’s dirty work was kept well from view, and what was not was always justified by the Cold War, in which the USSR, our former ally, was demonized. Anything was justified to stop “communism.”  And stopping communism was a good excuse to construct a global empire, all in the name of doing good.

Thomas Eakins

The 60’s brought an abrupt ending to America’s introverted dream of itself as the perfect Ozzie and Harriet-land of white-bread harmony.  Instead the fixed verities of the 50’s were up-ended as kids grew their hair long, disdained Mad Ave proprieties, and the civil rights movement flared into open warfare against the deep long racist reality of the nation.  The “cultural” war was on, challenging the status-quo assumptions of the country regarding race, sex, money, and myriad other “givens” of our society.  The seeds for a decades long tectonic shift in what America really is, and how it perceives itself, were planted.

Dallas, 1963Detroit, 1967Los Angeles, 1968Chicago, 1968

Even more frightening for those who found the 50’s a nirvana of normalcy, the actual demographics of the nation were changing colors: the country was slowly becoming non-white.  Women were demanding equal status.  The old verities of a patriarchal, racist culture were collapsing and anger was in the air.   It still is.

The Vietnam war coupled with the civil rights movement, rapidly joined by feminists and gays and other deprived elements of our society quickly ripped the veneer of 1950’s propriety to shreds and laid bare the hypocrisies of the nation.  It continues to this day, now shrieked out in headlines quoting the erstwhile President with racist diatribes and misogynist vomit.  The 1970’s roiled the nation in the wake of the 60’s and in rode a familiar figure, the cowboy in the white had, to the rescue. This particular cowboy was about as authentic as Wild Bill Cody, hailing from Illinois and Hollywood, a showbiz shill for General Electric and other corporate interests. Sporting an aw-shucks demeanor and an All-American down-home fake accent, Ronald Reagan offered respite from nearly two decades of turmoil.  He promised a Shining City on the Hill and trickle-down economics, though except for his own kind – the rich – he actually took a piss on the rest.  All the promised showers were golden.

In America’s seeming zig-zag politics – Reagan begot a one-term Bush which led to led to “good old (liberal) boy” Clinton, a sorta two-term “left” wobble that boomeranged to a two-term “right” Bush, Cheney’s inside-job 9/11, briefly stunning the nation into a seeming unity until the real Bolton intent was made clear with a fraudulent WMD-claim war, the catastrophic invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the deep fractures in our social comity stepped up into the glare of the spotlight. Soured on Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” liberals united behind the unheard silver-tongued black candidate, and Obama, at best a center-Republican of yore inside, was readily voted in, the Establishment’s Harvard-trained Manchurian Candidate, who deftly pulled the wool over the fawning liberals so pleased with themselves for showing their I-am-not-a-racist credentials for having voted for him.  Of course he could move in next door, though a guy from the hood with a boom box playing rap at the BBQ might not be so welcome.

Obama policies, liberal on the identity politics side, pro-Wall Street and hard-core military-industrial complex War War War on the foreign policy side, (but for Obama discreetly, with drones, off-the-books, black-ops, not spoken of lest the liberals notice) managed to flummox the nation.  We were, said he and others, now “post-racial.”  For eight years it became socially unPC to murmur anything that could be interpreted as racist or sexist or any violation of someone’s norms.  While ample signs pointed to the volcano just beneath the surface of our shared politics, the elite of the Beltway chose not to see it. In private they spoke of “deplorables” and simply missed what had been going on for 40 years behind their backs, off in the backwaters of “fly-over” land, that “globalization” had decimated and left behind. (Read William Kittredge’s 1998 book Who Owns the West for a prescient early view of this.)

Helen Frankenthaler

The flim-flam snake-oil salesman is embedded into our culture as deeply as anything: American as apple-pie.  Right down to our bedrock myths of ourselves, the scrappy pilgrims who built up New World from scratch.  Forget about the millions of indigenous people who were already here; forget about the millions of slaves.  And so on – it is a tired myth woven of lies and self-delusion.  Presently we are experiencing its death throes, the shudder of a centuries old society as it faces the mirror and cannot face the image which returns its stare.  We are brutal. We are ugly.  We are evil.

We are 4.4% of the world’s human population sitting on 7% of its landmass and gorging on 25% of the world’s resources.  We do this by having had the economic weight and military force to seize these resources by blackmail, extortion, military threats and when those fail, pure military force.  We have done it for some centuries now.  We are an empire, and as usual, an evil one.  Like all empires we pretend we’re the guys in white hats.

An honest history of ourselves tells us this was always so, and that the heroic stories we concocted for ourselves were false.  But before we bow out, we have a last show-biz con-man to survive and his millions of followers, many of them allegedly devout Christians who wallow in resentment and hatred, while clutching the Cross. Hypocrisy, if one reads our history well, is as American as apple pie, too.

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

                                                                                                    Walt Whitman

Our poet laureate sang his songs, enticing, beautiful.  And they offered one of the many threads which make up the tapestry of our communal delusion.  These days his self-celebration has curdled, as it has now many times, into a narcissism of feel-good gestures – yoga and recycling and solar panels and panels of Norman Vincent Peale emulators speaking the newest hip phrases of the same old balm.  Atop the curdled pop culture of our time sits a vulgarian impressario, a narcissist of the first rank, ready to lead his base of last-gasp old white racists over the buffalo cliff, taking everyone with him.

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candy store.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious.
Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable
private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain.

Everybody must have been a spy.
America you don’t really want to go to war.
America its them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.
Him big bureaucracy running our filling stations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

                                                Allen Ginsburg, Berkeley, January 17, 1956

 

American Pastoral #28

Since the last of these ruminations on the state of the American nation too much water has run under the bridge for the bridge to have accommodated it.  It’s inundated now, washed out by the tsunami of the Trump era’s endless bombast and show-biz shit-show. Having reduced our official politicians to the empty-suits they already were, Republican and Democrat, Trump entered the official institutions of government as the bull-in-China-shop, trampling everything in sight.  In doing so he has unmasked the emptiness of those structures as well as he stripped the Republicans naked and then left Hillary Clinton in shock and a majority of the public aghast.  On taking office he has carried out the same wrecking policies, in a blurred shuffle of names, placing a sequence of foxes in the hen house, such that the cabinet is in truth a dismantling organization along the lines of the quickly departed Steve Bannon’s desired “deconstruction of the administrative state.”  In practice this commenced in deleting regulations mostly over corporate behavior, de-funding of numerous social welfare programs, and now, coming to a peak,  direct attacks on the rule of law and the discarding of Constitutional restraints on executive power.  It is, in simple terms, an attempt to institute an American Fascism.

I spent the period from mid-October 2017 to March 2018, once again on the road in America, zig-zagging on back roads, visiting small towns and big cities.  It was a dispiriting journey which left me exhausted with America, its foibles and schizophrenia, its beauties and horrors.  The drumbeat of Trump’s malignant personality synchronized daily with the headlines in the news: school shootings, the stock market riding high, then dropping on an utterance or Tweet, the chronic postings of police violence against blacks, the ICE roundups of immigrants, and the scab of America’s built-in racism exposed and open, our psychic maggots swarming the dead corpse, all accompanied to the global warming “weird” new weather.  Through it all it felt the nation was floundering, flummoxed by its new Fuhrer who seemed to emit new offenses every day and yet remain unscathed. His alleged approval rate climbed from 33% to 40.

My journey had been, in part, to attempt yet again to make a final essay film about America, PLAIN SONGS.  I’d begun in 2012, failed; attempted again in 2014, and failed again; again in 2016.  Each time the ever more incoherent mess of American society had reared up in my mind, numbing me into wondering what possible purpose would be served in making a critique of this phenomenon when it was clear the place was already drowning in the thunderous noise of its own illnesses, and that no matter what, no voice would ever puncture its schizoid death-rattle.  There was nothing to say as there would be no one to hear.

 

To Elsie

The pure products of America
go crazy–
mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure–

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum–
which they cannot express–

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she’ll be rescued by an
agent–
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs–

some doctor’s family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us–
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

William Carlos Williams

   Rosa Parks

Some years ago – well actually it was decades – I had publicly spoken and written about this likely prospect, of the break up of the American nation, its culture and society.  I was, of course, deemed crazy, “extreme,” unable to see the unique wonder and beauty of our experiment, our “Exceptionalism.”  Instead I rattled on about the dubious wonders of our mode of American capitalism, about our fraudulent hoist-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps hokey “individualism,” or about our original sins of obliterating the natives of this land and pretending we “discovered” it, and of slavery, or of the infinitude of other things which constitute the real America and its history.  I’d done this since I was 16 or so.  And now, as history is catching up with me I find many voices emerging, seeing this reality, and the horrible political and psychic bill which confronts us.

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I grew up in a military family and in turn had an early education in how its values work, as a corrosive system of obedience, submission to “higher authorities,” brutalization both physical and mental.  I read the journals my father had, his “professional” magazines, and suffered his military psychoses.  Those journals read to me like a Kafkaesque nightmare in which the totally crazed plotted out, inside the system they lived in, the most depraved of thoughts.  And they not only thought them, but did them with the authority of the government. Gulf of Tonkin. My Lai. Experiments on soldiers.  Hiding the mess of nuclear facilities. And on and on. After all, they were the “muscle” of the government, there to step in when more discreet methods – economic extortion, silent “ops,”  weighted “diplomacy” – failed.  The list of American crimes in this realm is near endless.  Of our whole history, we have not been at war for 22 years.   The US military today cannot account for 21 trillion dollars, which it allegedly received.  It, like the rest of the nation, is utterly corrupted and corrupting.  And of all the institutions of the nation, it is the military which is “most respected”!

While this political cyclone whirls across the country, the superficial life-goes-on goes on. While it seems a dark cloud hangs overhead, a cloud of uncertainty, a cloud of astonishment – our police do this !  –  so many people think that ! – beneath all seems “normal.”  People go to their jobs, to cafes and restaurants and movies; they meet with their friends, make love, live, die and do all the things human animals always do.  But hovering around is something else, “normality” is disrupted.  The ghost of the dysfunction of the Weimar Republic lingers off-screen, and for most Americans is  utterly unseen.  After all, we are “Exceptional” and exempt from the usual forces of history.  And yes, we are indeed exceptionally self-deluded.

For myself I had seen this coming for some time, in some form or another, though I could not have figured out just what.  The normalcy of most Americans is that they live in an economic and military empire, which wars endlessly (though it does its best usually to keep it hidden), in order to produce these figures:

The USA is less than 5% of the world’s population.

It occupies 7% of the earths land surface.

It consumes 25% of the earth’s resources.

America is chronically cited as the world’s biggest economy, the lynch-pin of the global economic system, the most powerful and richest nation on earth.   These things are all owing to our imperial economic/military status:  like a good Mafia system, we offer deals one can’t refuse, on pain of “regime change” or flat out obliteration by a military far bigger and more powerful than any other.  Our “normalcy” is built upon this hard, ugly reality, and making a corrective to this would involve such a major change of our lives that most simply cannot comprehend it.  Even nice liberals.

 “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”   –  Upton Sinclair

This needs only a modest bit of tinkering to describe Americans and their place in the world.  In fact it is used often in political talk employed to explain and excuse our frequent foreign policy of blowing up places which decline to roll over and play dead when we extort them for natural resources.  We say something about “our national interests” and threats to “the American way of life” and send in the military.  In the Sinclair quote we need only change the word “salary” to “life-style” or “American way of life.”

“American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whenever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it. The same thing is not true of Germany, and until it was made true in Germany, there could be no free political democracy anywhere else in the world — to say nothing of any free social democracy. My revolutionary friends who will not recognize this fact seem to me like a bunch of musicians sitting down to play a symphony concert in a forest where there is a man-eating tiger loose. For my part, much as I enjoy symphony concerts, I want to put my fiddle away in its case and get a rifle and go out and settle with the tiger.”                                          –  Upton Sinclair

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“The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his “ideas” almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store. Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.”  –  Upton Sinclair

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Today’s newspaper, on the heels of certain balloon’s floated by Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, announced that the Maximum Leader declares that he cannot be indicted, subpoenaed, or anything else that irritates him.  He has declared that he is the law.

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The murmur of the pundits thus far has been muted; the public carries on.  The Brownshirts march.  (This is not metaphorical: Charlottesville, myriad cellphone shots of police-state behavior coast-to-coast, and Trump’s support of this all testify to this as an institutionalized reality.)

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“…realized that this country has gone so flabby that any gang daring enough and unscrupulous enough, and smart enough not to seem illegal, can grab hold of the entire government and have all the power and applause and salutes, all the money and palaces and willin’ women they want.”     –  Upton Sinclair

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On leaving America a few months ago, I had already concluded that the film that had partly prompted my journey was useless.  Perhaps that was a function of my age, now 75, or perhaps of an over-due “artistic burnout”.  Or perhaps simply an exhaustion with a life-long hard look at the country, society and culture from which I had emerged.

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While in the face of the affronts which Trump and his administration deliver to whatever it is Americans imagine their country to be, one would normally be a bit sanguine, and think, “Oh, there will be a blue wave” and other such thoughts directed toward finding a “correction.”   Just as many imagined a Hillary Clinton victory would have kept the ship of state sailing pleasantly on – Hillary back in the campaign was eager to assert America’s “exceptionalism” and would surely have carried on with the empire as usual.

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As a life-long surveyor of American society and culture, as well as being quite acquainted with other societies, I am not so “optimistic” that America will “self-correct” in a manner that would actually be positive.  Instead I think it will shift into – more so than it already is – a form of fascistic state in which police-power intimidates the comfortable to silence, “undesirables” are rounded up or simply erased with power (happens everyday in petty transactions of those people in their dealings with police and other “authorities”) and rather quickly “polite society” joins in.  One of the more remarkable aspects of American “exceptionalism” is that it blathers in inverse proportion about “freedom” while being a desperately conformist society.   When the pressure is on, most will fall in line.

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It seems to be something of the nature of our species, and its behavior, that we collectively have a periodic need to have a major blood-shedding.  This compulsion seems largely related to our tribal instincts, marking off “others” from “our group.”  This is clearly what has overtaken America, and whatever connective tissue had for a while appeared to have bound us together, is now so frayed as to be non-existent.  We go through the motions of “national unity” but there is none.  We are at war with ourselves, a condition normally called a “civil war.”   Of course in wars of any kind, civility is usually one of the first casualties.  In wars people “naturally” do atrocious things.  There is no reason at all to think we’ll be any different.

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If interested in the thoughts and process of the attempt to make Plain Songs, see this:

https://americanplainsongs.wordpress.com/

To see the essay films which it was to be a continuation of, see these:

SPEAKING DIRECTLY

PLAIN TALK & COMMON SENSE

American Pastoral #27

 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956

 

The long season of America’s electoral process has finally finished, and having dispatched at first the comical “best” of the Grand Old Party in an embarrassing sequence of primary “debates,” Donald Trump, regarded as the least likely candidate, and the easiest to beat by the Democratic National Committee, has emerged from the cultural rubble as victor.  Much of the nation appears to be in shock, having been told by most of the national media that Trump’s chances were nil.  The vast realm of what bi-coastals call “fly-over country” – the swathe from Eastern Pennsylvania on to the Rockies, and as well, all the West until you get to the sliver which hugs the Pacific Coast beyond the Sierras and Cascades – usually dismissively derided as uncultured and beneath contempt, all rose up to vote for Trump.  And given the oddity of the old slave-holder derived Electoral College, a minority of voters were able to secure a majority of the votes in this institution and hand the Presidency to Trump.  While geographically rather amiss, it appears indeed the South did rise again.  The irony that it did so through the hands of a Queens NYC crony capitalist is perhaps a bitter pill better left unmarked.

 

From Upton Sinclair’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935): “But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.”

Mose Allison

Mark Twain and John T. Lewis

Photo by Joe Podlesnik, Phoenix

Having known back-road America – that fly-over turf – now for 5 decades, living there or passing through on one-laner’s or dirt roads, with many friends living “out there,” I am well acquainted with the slow degradation of life that has happened in rural America.  Railroad services stopped, Main Streets gone dilapidated and empty, family farms absorbed into giant corporations, dwindling wild life, pollution from big-ag run-off, the blossoming of WalMarts and Dollar Stores, trailer parks, a plague of meth and alcohol, and all the signifiers of genuine social collapse.   In the hinterlands of the country this is what globalization wrought – devastation.  And at the same time an ever increasing political and social marginalization of those areas which did not partake of the economic benefits of this process.   Or in the rust-belt as factories closed, either shipped abroad to cheaper labor markets, or robotized, those whose livelihoods were lost were simply ignored, racked up in the statistics as un- or under-employed.  The coastal pundits suggested more education (or re-education?) while they turned college into another profit generator while running up a gigantic student-debt tally.  In the last few years, as the meth and then opioid epidemics hit this mostly white sector of the country, along with the suburbs, there was a sudden bit of attention directed to this population, as the nation’s pundits tried to figure out just what was going wrong.  If they ever left their cocoons of upper-middle class comfort and pulled their noses out of the academic studies and books du jour, and stayed in a low-class motel while slumming in the sticks, they might just begin to get a glimpse of what Donald Trump so expertly manipulated into his electoral win.  As Michael Moore, and others who actually know this world, knew and predicted, Trump played right into the zeitgeist of the national discontent that has been building for decades.

Trump’s America, voting-wise

Jim Harrison’s Montana writing room

Henry D. ThoreauEdward Hopper

Having willfully stirred the hornet’s nest of the nation’s traditional bass-line of racism, Trump has brought to the foreground a social poison which remains broadly with us – however much the previous years attempted to gloss it over, and despite the purely racist behavior of the GOP when confronted with Obama.  Dance as they would around “policy” it was clear from day one that McConnell and company were driven by hard-core racism to oppose anything Obama proposed.   And now, with the genie let loose from a decade and more of political correctness suppression, we are seeing a rising wave of racist acts across the country.  I am not surprised.  On my back road trips I saw graffiti such as “Obama” with a rifle cross-hair in the “O”, and other such outward signs that we were not at all in a “post-racial” time.  Trump has played on this repeatedly, and will surely continue to do so as he consolidates his power.  While he meekly disavows such things, he simultaneously goads them on with scarcely an effort to mask his real intent and views.    His cabinet choices underline this quite clearly.

Thelonius Monk and Alan GinsbergStanding RockPainting by Stephen Lack

Outside Scranton, Pa.West Virginia

America is at a crossroads.  Its decaying infrastructure is emblematic of a crumbling social contract, one that has frayed beyond recognition.  Were we a small country, like Italy under Berlusconi, it would be bad for many people, but manageable and to some degree even amusing.  But the USA is not a small country, and what happens in it impacts not only Americans, but the world.  As indicated by the last decade and more, as we oscillated from GW Bush, pressed under the sway of 9/11 (probably avoidable if it had not been desired by certain parties within the government) into a mindless war in the Middle-East, and then an economic collapse propelled by mindless consumerism and dirty banking, and then to Barack Obama, where for 8 years the tensions of the nation simmered under a cover of benign shoe shuffles from the White House while the GOP Tea Partied its way to a fundamentalist polka of racism, the Nixonian “Southern Strategy” on steroids, blanketed in a phony Christianity and “conservatism” dictated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh.  I might note that in cross-country jaunts the only occupants of the radio airwaves are right-wing talkers like Rush, and sleazy Christian preachers, interspersed with today’s awful rock and roll and C&W.  TV is Fox and Fox only.  The great swathe of fly-over country has been truly brainwashed, almost without opposition, and their embrace of the Republican Party – whomever it coughs up – is virtually religious, an act of unquestioning and thoughtless belief.   That’s what’s wrong with Kansas (and NE MO IND WYO etc.).

With the theatrics of the 2016 Presidential Election the dead rot of our political culture was laid naked – the vacuity of the Republican candidates, including Trump, was unfathomable in its shallowness, and while Clinton and Sanders sparred with some intelligence, it was still carefully within the range of the old era polit-speak, though Sanders sometimes stepped slightly outside the parameters of conventional Democratic Party parsing.   Trump’s vulgarism and crudeness swept all this aside, his yahoo base as sexist and crude for the most part as he himself.  And as he sold the snake oil, they bought, without reservation, taken in by a carnival barker from precisely the same elite, East Coast, moneyed people of whom they complained so loudly.  Trump would, so he said, be their spokesman, he’d take care of them, bring back the factories, put those people in their places, build a wall.  He loved the uneducated.

If his pick of cabinet members and other advisors is remotely indicative of the policies of the coming years, those fly-over folks have been taken to the cleaners like the rawest country rubes by a real New York city-slicker, as archetypal an American story as ever. Mr. Country, meet Rev. Gantry….

American Pastoral #26

Remiss in posting here, verging on a year – more or less on the road all the time, Marcella and I.   For that time the numbing cacophony of American politics has rumbled as a background noise throughout the culture, interwoven with the other threads of our communal quilt: football, baseball, basketball, the now-customary gun massacre in a shopping mall or school, or even church.  The economy wheezes, sneezes, and we are assured is on a painfully slow recovery from the banker’s bust of 2008.  While the naked eye can read these things in the homeless encampments in any city or town, and the forlorn downcast faces of placard holding “losers,” academics scan statistics to inform us that the cohort of middle-aged white American males holds the distinction of having an ever diminishing life expectancy, with high suicide rates, and deaths from drugs and alcohol.  Pundits scurry to analyze this data, to ponder just why this should be so here in the world’s richest nation. Statistics demonstrate the grotesque disparities in the distribution of American wealth; demonstrators echo the mantra of Occupy, of the 1% and the 99%, and these are belatedly mouthed by our current presidential candidates.

Meanwhile in distant lands Predator drones, and C-130 armed planes, drift high over the landscape delivering American policy, in the sudden rush of a Hellfire missile or cannon blast from 40,000 feet.  The “target objective” is (perhaps) vaporized, along with the tangential collateral damage.  Our serious columnists and pundits sift the think-tank data and opinion and then theorize on why some elements of the world’s population are angry with us.  There is no denial so successful as self-denial, and the American elite, rapacious and vicious, believes (at least some of them do) that our nation is out “doing good” in the big bad world out there.  Building democracy (backing right-wing dictators), bringing freedom (to be vaporized if you differ in what is best for your own),  developing free markets (where corporations dictate the rules).  What’s not to like?

Moving down the coast through a bedraggled and fracked Pennsylvania, we passed through Gettysburg, the grim cauldron of American nationhood, where the Union was – ever so American – enforced at gunpoint and vast bloodshed.   It became a national instinct, which these days finds its expression in the gun lobby, and rural America’s love of guns which it seems to correlate with “freedom.”  About 300 Americans are killed by guns everyday.  Among the casualties are veterans of America’s endless wars, who take their own lives at a clip of about 22 per day, mostly with guns.  More collateral damage.  The monuments to these men are the VFW halls which litter the rural world, one in almost every small town and city, where hardly anyone notes the curiousness of what they mean: Veterans of Foreign Wars.  Of which we have plenty.

 

Meandering further southward, we passed into the Deep South, where the sense of poverty deepened, and indeed the statisticians who crunch numbers confirm, if necessary, what the eye already reveals.  Though it takes a bit more than surface evidence to understand that these deep fried souls of the south, the white ones, the ones whose lifespans are contracting, are indeed the same who vote hard Republican Right, for those who would strip them of health care, of, in due time, Social Security and any other “safety net.”  All in the name of less “guvmint” and more Bible.  And in the name of not giving a crumb to Those People – the black ones, the Hispanic ones  – the any other than one’s own cracker good old boys.  Down South the purpose of a university is to host a money-making football team, and education comes far down the totem pole.   The rewards are a prideful ignorance and stupidity, worn as a badge of honor.  Fuck them libruls, and them pointy-headed college kids.  Go NASCAR.

.

Sprouting from this fertile ground, the current crop of Republican Presidential wanna-be’s assemble on television for their “debates” and revel in a political vulgarity that in another time would have seen them promptly booted from the stage.  Instead, in this benighted time, their inanities are taken as if serious, and even the New York Times kow-tows to their absurdities: the world is 6,000 years old (because the Bible tells me so); global warming is a hoax (because the oil industry tells me so.)   Too much idiocy to redundantly list here, though these idiocies are taken in some perverse PC-warp as acceptable by our media.   Science is a “belief” on an equal setting with, say, “Christianity.”   Thundering from the podium, we are sold pie-in-the-sky as snake oil –  old as the nation is our addiction to delusion.

“No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”     H.L. Mencken

Through the Southwest of res towns and spectacular landscapes, we veered north to the dilapidated once-city of Butte, one of my American touch-stones.  The vast spaces are punctuated with pockets of mocking wealth and faux Westernism – places like Santa Fe, Taos, Cody, Jackson Hole – sparkling next to the myriad run-down abandoned places strung along disused rail tracks.  The res towns seem frozen in amber, desolate and hopeless, suffocated by the bowl of sky above and the empty landscapes around them.   Once thriving towns lie in ruins, roofs collapsing, stores boarded up and empty.  Desolation is transparent and real.

They’re selling postcards of the hanging
They’re painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They’ve got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they’re restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They’re trying to blow it up
Now his nurse, some local loser
She’s in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
“Have Mercy on His Soul”
They all play on pennywhistles
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row

Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row

Robert Zimmerman

Landing in the self-conscious civility of Portland, where the invisible hand of the market masks racism, and the weird politeness of well-off hipsters hides its class-roots (those thousands of dollars of tattoos and piercings that “keep Portland weird” don’t fall from the sky), I felt exhausted, not of the thousands of miles on the road, but of the meanderings of my mind.  Road hum for me is something that loosens my thoughts, allows a vast free-flow of observations, perceptions, and experiences to intermingle, and opens up “thinking,”  which in its turn allows one to really “look.”

“Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.”  Goethe

Of America – boisterous, crazed, beautiful, ugly – I have seen enough to ponder the balance of my years.  Enough to guess its fractures now run so deep that it will, following in the wake of the USSR, stumble and collapse, and modestly soon – the next 30 to 50 years?  Enough to sense I have nothing more to add to the tumult of sounds which riven it, the avalanche of images and noises, which now run amok, out of all control, driving it towards ruin.   In all honesty I think nothing – certainly no political party, certainly no technical wizardry, certainly no “religious revival” (a recurrent American fall-back) – can thwart this spiral into dissolution.  Nor, really, should one try:  it is natural that things are born, grow, live, and then die.  As much for human constructs like nations and cultures, as for any living thing.

The pure products of America
go crazy–
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure–

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum–
which they cannot express–

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she’ll be rescued by an
agent–
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs–

some doctor’s family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us–
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

Wm Carlos Williams

American Pastoral #24

As I write, October 16th, 2013, the grand Kabuki drama of the nation rises to one of its cyclical peaks as the structural weaknesses of our Constitution come into synchronicity. In the next day or two this media orchestrated minuet will play out,  with a temporary collapse of the Tea-Party Republican extremist’s efforts to block so-called Obamacare, claiming the real concern is the Federal deficit, by threatening to defund the government, though most of the same people blithely upped the deficit, slashed taxes, and started two fraudulent wars without a care during the reign of George W. Bush – as VP Cheney famously said way back then, “Deficits don’t matter.”  But today, with a black man in the White House, they matter, if only as a rhetorical weapon-of-the-moment.  Or, instead, this dance may see the little hard-core of Tea Party Representatives willing and able to risk a global financial melt-down as the rigged “reserve currency” of the post-World War II era runs aground on the fractured politics of the nation which prints those famous old Greenbacks, as the “exceptional” USA defaults on its debts.  This in turn will accelerate the process where the great sloshing of globalized, unaccountable wealth is shifting its currency into what those with it imagine to be safer forms than silly old abstractions, like money.  Instead they buy “art” or real estate in places like London, New York, Abu Dubai, and other enclaves of the increasingly “only rich welcome” sanctuaries.

[Note: barring some last minute glitch, it appears the Republicans have blinked, and our grand Kabuki drama will carry on, with another riveting crisis being revved up off-stage at this very moment.]

Mark Rothko painting, sold for $86,882,500Jeff Koons work sold for $33,682,500

A Rothko painting is composed of a thin sheet of canvas, and some thin layers of paint, and a wooden frame.  Materially it is both easily degraded (the red tones in this work are especially vulnerable to fading), or destroyed.  Materially it is worth perhaps $100.   Clearly what is being bought is something else – either the experience of looking at it, or, the assumption that its investment value in terms of money will increase faster, say, than the value of stocks, or interest from loaning the money.   While the Koons work is materially more substantial, the money to purchase it was animated by the same assumption: that the “art” aspect would multiply its “value” more rapidly than other investments.  In both cases, the reality is that, exactly as is the case with “money,” what is being assumed is that a social agreement that something “abstract” has material value.  Money, whether “represented” with things like gold or silver (chosen long ago because they do not readily oxidize and change their atomic structure), or paper, is in effect a social contract, one which says X currency is worth X material something.  When I was young a cup of (bad in the USA) coffee cost 5 cents.  Today in most cafes a cup of perhaps good coffee would run $3 or so. You can do the math on the inflation and figure out that the social contract regarding the numbers shifted terms rather drastically in my life-time.   In a similar way the social contract in America – between Americans – has also drastically changed.

Two years ago Occupy Wall Street materialized, and shifted our political dialog sharply:  the phrases “we are the 99%” and its corollary, “the 1%” emerged from decades of suffocation with barbs about “class war.”  OWS was initially ignored by the press, and then briefly given coverage as it spawned across the country.  At the same moment the NSA, CIA and FBI, in a Federally coordinated effort, collaborated with local police departments to heavily clamp down and as best they could, destroy this movement.  But the cat had been let out of the bag and a broad social awareness of the ever increasing disparities regarding the grossly tilted distribution of wealth, topics which are now almost everyday conversation, and around which our thoroughly corrupted politicians must dance, had been birthed.  Hence today’s minuet, which, as I write, appears headed towards an absurd “settlement” of kicking the can down the road 4 months.  And behind the curtains, cynic that I am, I can see the next act in this American theater of the Absurd:  in the coming months, as the Congress sits down to “seriously” decide on the Nation’s budget for the coming years, decade, whatever they say, in a signal of his “flexibility” President Obama will agree to cutting Social Security costs, cutting Medicare and Medicaid costs, and doubtless many other things.  However our sacrosanct military, and its burgeoning adjunct of the vast security state which has blossomed since 9/11, will not be touched.  And perhaps, as a signal of its reasonableness the counter-party will admit to some tiny tax here or there, though preferably it would be along the line of a VAT, “so we can all share the burden.”  Bets?

But, just in case the dog and pony show in the District of Columbia doesn’t provide enough sleight-of-hand to duly befuddle the citizenry, we can always count on mass media circus to do the job.

Early Andy Warhol

As this scenario has essentially been going on since we started, at the very outset anointing ourselves as “exceptional” and telling whatever untruths were necessary to support our illusion, beginning with our blatant theft of an entire continent from its inhabitants under the ironclad law that “might makes right” – after all, what were “they” doing with all this except wasting its values?  And on through a founding document which asserted that “all men are created equal” which was written by wealthy men who owned slaves, and whose document actually only considered white male landowners as “men” and on through the rest of our sordid mountain of self-delusions, which we must confront every day, and which confound our politics and society as they historically always have.  To untangle this mess of contradictions is certainly more than our institutions can cope with, which as the stresses of these days indicate, will lead to a breaking up of our Union, as the diverse interests and beliefs of our populace decide myth is not a good place in which to actually live.

Bill TraylorTrick or treat!

American Pastoral #23

Detroit, photo by Mark EifertPoint Mugu, Ca.  –  Jost

Corporate building, Oxnard, Ca.Oil field, near Taft, Ca.

Pacific Ocean, near Carpinteria, Ca.Wood along Swanton Road, Davenport, Ca.

Winter has slipped by, leaving the Rocky Mountains and Sierra’s bereft of the “normal” snow-pack, and in turn predicting a grim summer of drought, fires, smoke-choked skies, and rationing of water down-stream in Arizona, California and throughout the West.  To the east, rain and snow has been more than usual, hinting perhaps at floods.  In the same moment our political dialog remains in stasis, the special interests of oil buying the airwaves to insist the evidence is not in, never mind the flooding of lower Manhattan and extensive coastal damage in the east caused by Hurricane Sandy some months ago – global warming is a myth, and it’s full steam ahead on the Keystone Canadian tar sands XL pipeline, despite the recurrent leaks and ruptures in the pipeline infrastructures around the globe.  Recall  Deepwater Horizon, BP’s little incident on the gulf?   Business as usual in the oil biz.

The Presidential election over, and the rather convincing evidence of a culturally “liberal” national consensus being revealed, our Republicans are falling over themselves cozying up to same-sex marriage and other right-wing taboos, just as they fell all over themselves embracing evangelicals and tea-partiers not so long ago.  In the wake of the shootings in Newtown, Ct., even the matter of some kind of gun control has become speakable in Republican language, though the NRA is doing its best to enforce its control.  And yet we seem intractably frozen in our large communal conversation, unable to actually even speak, much less act in the face of piles of problems, accumulating as time goes by.  Whether with the accelerating collapse of the “middle class” or the utter ignoring of the now 30% of the population who are “poor,” or the ever increasing concentration of wealth at the very top of our fiscal pyramid, or with the very real consequences which will visit us from global warming – water crises, evacuations of major urban concentrations, diminishing food supplies for an expanding populace – our inability to even begin a conversation will write our epitaph.  Cruising for a bruising.

Jim Nisbet’s workshop, San FranciscoAutumn trees, eastern WashingtonMorro Bay, Ca.

Geronimo in Shoshone, Wyo.Port Angeles, Wa.

American Pastoral #22

Hurricane Sandy rolls off the American East CoastGrand Coulee dam, photo JostPhilip GustonGrant Wood

Above photos: J Jost

WeegeeJasper JohnsJost

Russell Means, AIMSusan RothenbergJostThe Real Thing

With the blessings of the Supreme Court’s  Citizens United ruling, which has sanctified money as a form of speech and proscribed any limits for it, the present quadrennial cycle of America’s political landscape has flourished as never before, with literally billions of dollars being spent to broadcast a flood of bile and lies, amplified by the corporate owned “press,” which now merely repeats the calculated sound-bites of the candidates and their PACs and party propaganda organs, and has unleashed a flood worse than that with which Hurricane Sandy inundated New Jersey and New York.  Our electoral system has gone berserk on a hit of endless greenback steroids, and a “politically correct” 4th Estate which seems unable to call a lie a lie, and is clearly in the pockets of our corporatocracy.  Awash in a constant dose of fraud and corruption, our citizenry is numbed, as is clearly the intention of the Wizards of Oz who manipulate this social landscape with the purpose of concentrating the land’s wealth into ever fewer hands and stripping any control of political and economic levers from anyone but themselves.  The Plutocracy is in full flower, shamelessly.   Their advocate Mr Romney, himself of minor wealth by comparison, is game for any contortion required, and the exhausted and corrupted body politic applauds this as if politics were a bizarre circus in which the greater the pretzel twisting, the more the reward.  America has descended in a political death spiral, as if instantly turning itself into a mode of Berlusconi’s Italy in which criminality runs the show and the larger part of the population gazes in admiration at the capacity of the crooks to bend the system to their will.  Where we once pointed to others as the ultimate in corruption – Italy, Egypt, some Central American “Banana Republic” – we can now only honestly point to ourselves.

Edward Hopper

Jost

Shulamith FirestoneEmily Dickenson and Kate Scott TurnerJackie and JFKBrooks Range, Alaska; Sebastian Salgado

Bikini Island nuclear test X-ray1Sol Lewitt drawing

American Pastoral #21

Alberta oil sands, headed to USA by pipeline

OWS, Denver. Colo.

Federal Prison, Florence, Colorado

DetroitArkansas River

Phil Glass with score of Einstein at the BeachButte, MT.

Summer’s turpitude has lapsed, and the world has scurried back to work, to school, to the everyday hum-drum of what we imagine is “life.”  In America, in this year, 2012, the autumn is overwhelmed with politics as our quadrennial charade of “democracy” takes the forefront of our national life.   After a numbing sequence of primary elections, and the Republican’s ill-fated endless series of auto-destructive “debates,” the dust has settled and the candidates for President has narrowed to the permitted two.  In this case, representing the Elephant symbol of the Republicans it is Mr Romney, scion of industrial wealth, and self-proclaimed biz-whiz.  And representing the Donkey symbol of the Democrats, is Mr Obama, running for his second term, after 45 months of being hog-tied by an anything-but-loyal opposition, which has done everything it can to damage the political prospects of the incumbent, even if it meant inflicting grievous damage on the nation – which it has.  And so, with the curiously inverted political coloring of red and blue strangely switched since Cold War days when red was the taboo commie/pinko code, and blue the benign sign of patriotism, the American versions of Left and Right will have at it.   That Mr Obama is politically a step or two to the right of Republican Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, but masquerades as a Democrat, while Mr Romney morphs to whatever pander pose seems to strike him as opportune for the moment, all serves to corrode this grand national theater with a cynicism which seems to transcend party lines.  Both sides of the aisle genuflect to the same masters – the bankers, the military-industrial complex, and the not-so-hidden powers that govern our national life with total control over money, the media, jobs, the law, and, of course, the politicians who represent them.  Thus those who have transparently transgressed beyond the laws they themselves have written are all naturally left utterly unfettered and set free:  war crimes are hush-hushed, great financial crimes are not prosecuted, the President sits as judge, jury and executioner in violation of the Constitution which he is sworn to uphold, the great national security state carries on with its spying, torturing, and other Orwellian practices – such as “extreme rendition” (to say kidnapping, torturing and sometimes killing in the name of the State).   Needless to say, none of this will be mentioned in the coming days of political rhetoric.  Nor will either party suggest that spending half the “discretionary” budget of the US government on the military is in any way a dubious matter, or indeed sure to bankrupt the nation, in keeping with the usual nature of empires.  Nope, goldern it, instead Mr Romney says he’d increase the military funding by 10%, while Mr Obama drones merrily away, nicely masked by the Neanderthal neo-con con-game.  In the name of the nation’s businesses, it’s American corporations über alles, by hook or crook.  This time the snake oil is in the neo-liberal process of privatizing about everything, while socializing the losses, and blaming the poor for the red ink.  Mr Obama is as much a party to this as is Mr Romney.   Indeed the entire spectacle appears little more than a highly formalized minuet in which the thuggish reality of America’s actual real-politik is obscured by the impolite shrieking of our mass media, and the cartoon buffoonery of our now nearly endless campaign season, mired in small-time cultural warfare while we engage endlessly in militarized global warfare.   So, while there are some tangible, real world differences in the outcome of whether one or the other is President for the coming four years, the baseline is much the same:  the rich and powerful get off free, the military bloats more and ever more corrupt, the media lies with no kind of punishment for doing so, and the nation will, whomever “wins,” drift ever more toward dissolution.  Our politicians, with their lapel pins, their plastic folksiness, their transparent corruption, all look and behave ever more like their old Soviet counterparts – those pre-embalmed figures who graced the reviewing stands on Red Square, caught in the illusionary bubble of their faltering system, sure of their mystical powers until the edifice crumbled before their eyes.  Likewise will the United States stumble onward, reciting self-pleased rhetoric about its exceptionalism, its inherent goodness, its dynamic economy, and all the other bromides our politicians utter as their mandatory catechism.    If you don’t play that game, you are not allowed to play at all.  To participate in America’s Kabuki politics, one must be blind.

The deal with the devil was long made.  Their hands lie open awaiting the silver coins due them for their prostrations before the great powers that really run the show.

General Sherman

American Pastoral #20

White Elk Motel,  Idaho (Photo: Jost)Shield, Chief Arapoosh, Montana, 1825Jasper Johns, MapGeorge Zimmerman, killer of Trayvon MartinTarget Store (Photo: Linn Ehrlich)Dalton GangDead pines near Butte, Mt. (Photo : Jost)Storm clouds move over west of Palmyra, IndianaAaron Siskind photographBy the tracks, Missoula Mt. (Photo: Jost)

Festooned with the bright colors of the flag, America entered summer 2012 with the bang of fireworks, concomitant fires, and a vast heat wave hinting at our hot future, and of course, the cyclic noise of electioneering.  Soon lawns will bloom with campaign posters – Obama or Romney – though from where I write now – Montana – is more inclined towards Ron Paul.  The drone of pundits will assert a secret knowledge to be found in the arcane tea-leaves of gaffes, and eager to make of our quadrennial electoral charade a contest, they’ll take any dip or bump in “the market” as a sign of disaster or hope for one of the two authorized and permitted candidates.  Blame will be duly apportioned for whatever befalls the nation – a drought or flood, an economic slip, or a bonanza.  Given the Supreme Court’s recent rulings, billions will be spent to cajole the voting population into supporting this or that candidate with an avalanche of falsehoods, lies, and bombast, not to mention legalistic maneuvers to delete from the rolls certain segments of the populace, and where that fails, to confuse them with bogus mailings, false addresses.   It matters, in certain essential matters, not at all who “wins.”  The game is rigged, and while in many domestic matters it will matter a little, in the basic ones governing America’s imperial behavior, it won’t matter at all:  the drones will drone on, the military-industrial complex will continue its path, and we will all follow.   Thus flows the beneficence of our democracy, in which a combination of self-interested hyper-wealth and a vast public ignorance are meant to deliver wisdom to the public domain.  Good fucking luck.

John BaldassariJackson Pollock, Lavender MistBy Clearwater River, Idaho (Photo: Jost)Schoops, Photo by Linn EhrlichElvis Presley and Oral RobertsMose Tolliver, Alabama

Miles Davis arrestedJFK Bar, Anaconda Mt. (Photo: Jost)

Walkerville, Mt. (Photo: Jost)Mercury Showroom, Los AngelesBob DaltonWalt Whitman

And so another July 4th comes and goes, announced with barbeques and fireworks, the birth of the nation celebrated in a mindless and drunken splurge.  What was it all about, that Declaration of Independence?

American Pastoral #19

Near Ellensburg, WashingtonSouth Fayette, Pennsylvania

From Nathaniel Dorsky’s Triste

I returned to America from Korea after almost four years’ absence, in mid-March.  Taking a whirl-wind tour from Los Angeles, to Portland (Or.), to Nashville and Knoxville, then on to Tampa, Chicago, Kansas City, and then to Minneapolis, Northfield, St. Cloud and Mankato, Minn., and finally down to Lincoln, Ne. and  Stanberry, Mo. where I shot a film for my friend, Blake Eckard.  I acted in it as well.   The journey was prompted by a wish to get a quick over-all sense of the state of the Union, which I’d tracked somewhat obsessively from my distant perch in Seoul.  From that remove I’d read the statistics on unemployment, the grim news of the economy.   From the glancing view I got on this trip, it was frankly difficult to perceive this, but then I was traveling for the most part in the economic cocoon of academia, a firmly middle-class realm in which $4 for a cup of coffee is taken without a comment.  It was only on an Amtrak ride from LA to Portland, and a few bus rides I took – Nashville to Knoxville, and Mankato to Lincoln – where I was afforded a glimpse of the other America.  The fiscal chasm which divides America is deep, and seems carefully constructed to hide from both sides the reality which unites them.  I found myself wondering how many of those people who filled the restaurants and cafes and bars I was taken to as a guest – often places which on my own I’d never entertain – were living on credit.

Plains Indian Moccasins

Fake Jackson Pollock paintingWoodpeckersPunditsAmerican Menorah

Hydraulic fracturing waste disposal

It’s an election year, and the divisiveness of the last years is being amplified in our four-year cycle of political combat.  In the last few years the Supreme Court has issued rulings which effectually make our supposed democracy a system formally for sale to the highest bidder.   Asserting that corporations are de facto “persons” and that money is speech, the Court has openly condoned what is now legalized corruption, evident in the avalanche of super PACs flushing millions of dollars into the political process, whether for advertising blitzes or into the pockets of  “lobbyists” who in turn slip it into the pockets of our revolving door politicians.   As in the classic American axiom “Money Talks and Bullshit Walks” the massive flow of funds from Wall Street through the halls of Congress is now transparent, and in the form of ALEC has shown up in every State House as well, ready to bend the “law” to favor still more the interests of “business.”   America is busy fracking itself to pieces, all in the name of patriotism, profits, and the God Almighty Buck.  American as Apple Pie.

Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt

The American Dream

Danny Lyons motorcycle in the mid-westJasper John’s NumbersEd Ruscha’s ExitTrayvon Martin’s memorial

On my arrival back in Los Angeles, as I left the plane, an airline stewardess asked me if I was glad to be back.  I answered her, “I don’t know yet.”   It remains my view.

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #122