September 2002

As has been emphasized vigorously by foreign allies and by responsible leaders of former administrations and incumbent officeholders, there is no current danger to the United States from Baghdad. – Jimmy Carter, Truthout

“Iraq is sitting on top of large oil reserves, which could produce several million barrels of oil daily,” said Kenneth Mayland, head of ClearView Economics in Cleveland. “Once a friendly government is installed in Iraq, they will be pumping a lot of oil and that will mean lower prices for American consumers.” – Martin Crutsinger, AP, The Oregonian, Sept. 26, 2002

Bee Season, a novel by Myla Goldberg, is very interesting. A family of four is coming unglued while its members pursue transcendence through Jewish mysticism, Hare Krishna, stealing and spelling.

I want to stand on a street corner

And offer

Curses for peace

Went to hear Michael Parenti speak.  A few notes:

Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy.

“Haves” are really the “have-it-alls.”

In the federal budget $20 billion goes to welfare, $100-120 billion to corporate welfare.

Deficit spending is a hidden subsidy for the rich.

Poverty is growing faster than world population.

“Conspiracy is not always a theory.”

The U.S. is trying to prevent the emergence of regional powers, self-defining countries.

Over 100,000 people were killed in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.

People in other countries see the U.S. as “arrogant, hypocritical and self-absorbed,” a “batterer nation.”

The House of Mirth, movie version – the title must be ironic.

People get nihilism wrong. Kierkegaard said that in the face of nothingness, you have complete freedom to reinvent yourself and the world around you. Destroying everything is only the first step. The second step is building it back up, which is much harder. Most nihilists don’t think about that second step. – Chuck Palahniuk, Willamette Week

Spacey may be the same thing as enlightened.

Remember “enlightenment?” You were supposed to spend years doing exercises. Instead we got stoned. Did that make us enlightened? No, but it made us stoned.

I can’t be literal for too long. I wear it out.

Someone told me a long time ago that I talk like a book.  I hope so. Books are usually interesting. Unlike people, who tend to repeat whatever Bush just said. “I’ll have whatever he’s having.” War.

The U.S. has a long history of supporting murderous dictators, including Saddam Hussein. But when we want to take over a country, for selfish reasons, we say their leader is a bad guy.

Most leaders are bad guys, including our own.

The idea behind the Web is to drill endless tunnels between everything.

So we are all editors.

All day yesterday I thought it was Friday. – Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

See, see!

Downtown Portland looks just like a downtown. Perfect casting.

I look at children, bright, curious, full of life, and wonder how they got turned into adults like me.

In a Wall Street Journal column, Albert Hunt says the Democratic proposal for a Medicare prescription drug benefit would cost $105 billion per year in 2012. In that same year, eliminating Bush’s tax cut for the top one percent of taxpayers would yield $115 billion.

In India the lowest caste is called “untouchable.” We have something like that here too, only it is more literal and not connected to social status. Our untouchables are singles. Outside of the occasional handshake or hug from a female friend or relative, no one touches you. It’s very isolating. Makes you completely dependant on conversation for any sense of human connection.

I wonder if it’s possible, in this place and time, for a writer to be read slowly?

Wine, like a doctor’s prescription, a local anesthetic for the brain.

I have to locate myself in the world. I’m sitting in a plastic chair on a wooden deck in our backyard, mild bright sunny day, watching a squirrel run around, leap from a shed roof into a tree, sun on gray board fence. M has spread peaches from her tree on the deck to ripen.

For two centuries the U.S. and world economies have been supply-driven. But in the 21st century, virtually every industry is in oversupply and companies have lost their ability to increase prices. We are now a demand-driven economy. – ad in Wall Street Journal

A lot of us do not find ourselves over-supplied. High prices created an undersupply of people who can afford to pay them. I don’t know anyone, for example, who can afford to buy a new car. Or a new house.

Also, “we have all been here before.” Advertising was invented in the 1920s because factories were producing more than people were buying.

I’ve finally understood that retirement is dangerous, even for me. I’ve run out of things to believe in, stories to tell myself. I have no obvious purpose. I must learn to sit. To not do.

I admit to being combative. I could probably warm up to war if I could choose the weapons: words at 20 paces.

Well all right, fighting is not good for me. I’m cursed with a nervous system both irritable and “sensitive.” But gee, I sure would like to do some damage….

It’s so unfair that the editors of The Oregonian get unlimited space for their opinions, while I, rarely, get 150 words in a letter to the editor. Even with the Internet, we haven’t managed to break the rich people’s monopoly on public attention.

How could we? Distribution of leaflets at public events and door-to-door, backed up with a website. Very labor intensive.

In Portland sometimes thousands will show up for a public rally or protest, but they will not do the kind of steady work that supports electoral politics. It is impossible to get enough volunteers to make an impact on public perception.

Thought is so thin, compared with experience.

I am helplessly rereading Natalie Goldberg’s book on writing, Wild Mind. I get lost so easily.

It is so hard to just let it be. Someone, often me, keeps wanting me to do something else. Something I don’t do.

My father used to say, “Yeah, everyone’s out of step but you.” Well, they are.

I’m still alive. I think that’s a very attractive quality in a man my age.

They say a liberal is someone who hasn’t been mugged yet. I guess a conservative is someone who hasn’t yet been beaten by cops.

Love doesn’t last, politics does. – Sylvia

We need a losers’ rebellion.

For some time, knowledgeable foreigners have found it difficult to talk about much of anything to Americans because we appear to know so little about much of anything. – Gore Vidal, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, 1992

Another activist today was praising Japanese politeness, and wishing we were like that. As far as everyday interaction goes I agree, but my political heroes are all acid-tongued: Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Jim Hightower, Michael Moore. They all know how to cut through the crap.

I find it hard to do political work with liberal Democrats, because I have to bite my tongue. They all believe in a world that doesn’t exist. How do I talk to someone who admires Bill Clinton, or thinks Al Gore would have made a great president?

It is my duty to tell you that the above-mentioned writers can all explain this better than I can. But my explanations are shorter.

I remember, probably around 40 years ago, when a transistor was about the size and shape of a pencil eraser. Now, according to an article in PC Magazine, transistors embedded in computer chips are smaller than bacteria.

Transistors are electronic gates, where a small current controls a larger one. They replaced tubes which used to glow inside radios. In 1963 Navy electronics gear still had tubes in it, but you could buy transistor radios, made by the Japanese, at the base store.

I’m fading out, operating in ghost mode.

Wit is a movie (video) about an English professor dying of cancer, being witty and erudite in the process. Emma Thompson. Good one, intelligent.

I keep noticing a sense of unreality, as if the way we live is just a facade.  There may not even be a man behind the curtain. Probably he got bored and left, a long time ago.

Historically, radicalism was about economics, the distribution of wealth, the right of working-class people to a fair share. More recently it has been about the protection of minorities, the environment and peace. All good things, but they don’t move a large number of the electorate, and they don’t get us any more money.

Modern American radicalism often seems insufficiently concrete. Rhetoric. Tell me what you propose to do for me, and people like me, people I can identify with. I don’t care about the mortgage tax break, haven’t got a mortgage.

Radicals are theoretical people: we are always imagining a world that does not yet exist.

We are a small weight in American politics, a counterbalance to the pragmatists, those practical people who are always dragging us down to ruin. Their practicality lies in allowing large amounts of evil to preserve small amounts of good. Their mantra is “compromise.” The net effect of all that compromising has been to pull the country steadily to the right. Tax cuts for the rich, chop the safety net, war.

A column by Noam Chomsky, America’s leading radical intellectual, in yesterday’s Oregonian, on “Why do they hate us?” Us being the United States. They hate us because we’re greedy and violent.

“He said the voices were hungry, that talked in his head.” – a song by John Stewart

Craziness is the functional equivalent of stupidity.

As the Oregon legislature fights over how to plug a huge deficit, The Oregonian says things are getting ugly in Salem. Good. Politics should be ugly. No truth without anger.

It’s the 19th of September. I feel grayness and constant rain rushing towards us. It’s like death: I’m not ready.

Isn’t the complete avoidance of illegal behavior a social phobia?

Identity is a trap. It’s always based on what we do, and that’s completely unreliable. Better to have no identity.

A young woman I knew 20 years ago said, of romance, “My experience is, most of the time it doesn’t work out.” That’s my experience of life.

We need to let go of who we think we are. I am not an activist. I’m a wandering cloud.

A group discussion I would like to have: when you see clearly that your culture is crazy, how do you stand it? What do you do to feel better?

Not only is biological evolution no longer operative for humans, but cultural/political evolution isn’t working either. We aren’t getting any better.

In America it has become a privilege to do anything worthwhile. So little is.

What would you call it, the mental state this country is in now, contemplating war, hiding from itself its greed and guilt? Dissociation?

The Body Artist by Don DeLillo, more a poem than a novel. Brilliant, I suppose, in the way he bends language until it screams, but so elliptical, elusive, as if he were simultaneously straining to say something and not say it, never ending up where he was going, distant, always dancing just out of reach. I could not grab a hold of it. I don’t think I was supposed to. Fortunately it’s only 124 pages.

This, yes, she thought, but on the other hand, maybe not.

And I thought I was obscure.

I’m hoping that if we go to war with Iraq it will be a disaster and a lot of American soldiers will die. Because that seems to be the only way we learn. And we don’t remember. It has been too long since Vietnam.

Watching The Matrix, for the second time, on TV, it’s easy to see it as a metaphor for the way we live. The artificial world invented to keep us under control while we’re used. And even when you know it’s not real, it’s very difficult to wake up.

I think the Internet helps, by making it easy to spread the word, point out the lies. At the same time, it numbs the mind with information overload.

In the late 60s, during the Vietnam war, we stood outside supermarkets and handed people mimeographed flyers.

Time does travel.

Love is an addiction. Once we’ve had it we desperately do not want to give it up, so we keep going back, even when the loved one is destructive, even when we no longer get any love from them. It takes a long time to let go. Much like grief, only there we have no choice, because they’re no longer there to go back to.

I always pick very difficult things to do, on the edge of impossible, and then get burned out when it doesn’t work. Why can’t I want to do something easy? Or at least possible.

Maybe because I get my ideas about what is worth doing from reading novels.

Possible is boring.

I’ve reached the age where I realize I’m never going to fit into anyone else’s fantasies. Or mine.

Walking around my neighborhood on a chilly last day of September, helps put things in perspective – sun shining on the real world.