Reality Check

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
Due to all the reading I'm doing on Charles Ives, a student of Emerson and Transcendentalism (an American religion), I'm going to try and read all of Emerson's works. It's been several decades since I last read Emerson; I was leaning toward socialism when I was a college kid and Emerson seemed very "protestantly" socialistic--I quit reading Emerson when I got involved with the Libertarians in Holland, Michigan, reading Ludwig Von Mises and Freddie Hayak, Austrian economists, and liking it because of the liberty it offered but not liking it because it was too much Calvinism for me. I grew up in a Calvinist-leaning home (a branch of the Church of Christ (another American invention) led by an old German Lutheran rebel named R.H. Boll) and I don't believe in "working for the day is coming when we'll work no more," which is what the Calvinists believe: the world is a place of hard toil and constant troubles. Working hard, you see, takes your mind off the wonderful pleasures the earth offers and which these Christian slavemasters attribute to evil and this imaginary boogieman they call Satan (or The Devil). Devils are in all religions.

I just read that 91% of Iraqis want the US out of their country so they can handle their currently split society in their own way (one of which might be to gas 30 or 40 thousand Kurds--Iraqis hate the Kurds--remember, everybody hates the Kurds--or, hell, they might just put Saddam Hussein back in office--wouldn't that be a hoot?). Bushie Boy, our childlike "president," says we can't leave because of our valuable position in the phony war on terrorism (and there'll be red alerts all around election time, you wanna bet?) there in Middle East affairs. Plus, don't forget, he was gonna use that oil to pay for all his wars, the ones he's currently losing (Iraq and Afghanistan) and the future ones, which he'll lose, too (Iran and Syria). With eyes shut tight, this fool leads us on down toward another layer of Hell, way past that horrible 7th level.

The Dumbocrats are putting all their eggs in the election basket. No one, not one damn soul, is standing up to this little monster like a true hero we so badly need. Like Obama; hell, he's over there in his father's native land, Kenya, being hailed a hero; why isn't he overhere being a hero? Like fighting for his people in New Orleans; like fighting to impeach Bush and bring all our soldiers home, a lot of whom are black men and women, along with a lot of Spanish kids, and also all those poor-soul white trash kids, like Lyndie England from the hills of West Virginny, old Bob Byrd's homebase?

I don't understand high-profile "liberals." If they are such heroes, why aren't they defying death and arresting Bush and putting him in a Federal dump of a prison (Gitmo's too sweet for him) or have the fart-joking bastard on the run and being pursued by John Walsh and the America's Most Wanted crowd? I don't get it.

Peace is in understanding. Emerson's right on that account. But understanding is pretty difficult for most over-evolved chimp-human hybrids, no matter the language.

I'm watching Tiger Woods playing golf today; he's leading this tournament by one stroke [he went on to win it in a playoff--he's now won 4 tournaments in a row, including two majors], playing at beautiful old Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio, home of the old Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, a planatation-style company that was built off the slavery of the rubber collectors on all the rubber plantations Firestone owned, especially in Liberia, where Firestone still uses slavery to gather their rubber, though Firestone is now called Bridgestone after they were taken over by a Japanese tire conglomerate. You know where Japan got its rubber in WWII? They don't have rubber trees in Japan. How about the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company of Akron, Ohio? Just like Henry Ford contributed scrap iron to the Japanese imperial cause. But, whatever, all that rubber built a truly great American-style golf course up there in Akron, also home of the Akron Dragons baseball team. And watching Tiger Woods, who's at least part-black, worth millions of bucks play the best golf any human has ever played, Jack Nicklaus included, I still can't help but think, "Hey, Tiger, you're playing on a golf course built off the skins of your ancertors's asses, perhaps even your Asian ancestors's asses, too."

All these ironies go through my head all day as I sometimes have to face reality--and when I do, Jesus, like the turtle, I want to withdraw back into my own shell; it's the only place that makes sense to me right now--and it's so peaceful inside that shell...I guess, about as peaceful as it is playing golf for a guy like Tiger Woods.

I saw Michael Jordan on teevee the other night and he said he spent most of his time now playing golf; not professionally, but as a 4 handicapper at the fashionable L.A. country clubs--where these guys couldn't have played only a few short years back, playing constantly, morning, noon, and night--and you better believe he's gambling while playing golf, too. I've been in country club money matches where the money put down on each hole got bigger and bigger until the last hole when the skins pot could be up to a thousand bucks and that was back in the 50s and 60s where today a thousand bucks would be more like 10 thousand or even 20 thousand. Jordan supposedly was 35 million in the hole at one time with his gambling; of course he denies it's gambling; he calls it "competition" and where he used to burn up his competive nature on the basketball court, now he does it on the golf course. I just wonder why these guys don't see a better future helping humanity rather than wasting their fortunes on self-indulgency--powder-puffing their enormous egos. Egos bloated by wealth. These rich people have so much money they just simply don't know what to do with it all. Michael Jackson goes on million-dollar shopping sprees; Michael Jordan loses millions of dollars on the golf course.

The world is so depressing a place and here I am listening to a bunch of millionaire baseball players playing plantation-style baseball (aren't ballplayers owned by the owners of the baseball teams--the old Massuhs?) on the radio and watching a bunch of millionaire golfers. Golf is an easy sport, folks. I once set the course record for nine holes at a golf course in Texas and I'm a second-rate golfer because I never used to practice, just hit the ball naturally hard and long and putted with an eagle eye absolutely naturally. The ways of hitting a golf ball are the same as hitting a baseball; you must keep your eye on the ball. In baseball, it's the same thing with fielding; you have to keep your eye on the ball even then.

It also bothers me seeing Martha Stewart fully accepted back into teevee and I'll guarantee you there are ex-teevee jocks or deejays whose careers were ruined because of a felonious offence and here's Martha just purring along doing her silly shit as though everything is this damn world is just peachy keen. Seems like she should be out shouting about how awful our prison system is--or against the harsh drug laws in this country, which is probably why most of the women Martha was in the hoosegow with were there; I'm sure they weren't there for stock swindling--they were mostly there for drug abuse or crimes related to drug abuse--while Martha can do drugs with impunity. I'm not saying Martha does drugs, maybe she doesn't, but I'll bet she's been to plenty of Westport and the Hamptons parties where there was any kind of drug you cared to indulge in--I might even just jump on out there and say, I'd bet the farm she's smoked pot and done some coke in her many past heydays.

I'm trying to be transcendental--I'm acting as though I am a god, which is very transcendental, though I'd rather be understanding than shouting at the top of my growling lungs--ululating madly at the stupidities of humans--like continuing to fly on airlines who are more concerned about the time they have to sit on an airport tarmac than they are about the safety of their passengers, which they refuse to do themselves saying that's the responsibility of the US government, because airports are usually owned by the cities they are in and controlled by the government airport regulators. How about the stupid pilot who yesterday took off from the wrong runway and killed all but one of the 50 passengers? I'll bet he was a little tipsy.

It's just hard for me to understand, I'm sorry, Ralph Waldo. Understanding takes a lot of understanding to get to its upper reaches, which is ultimate comprehension. Comprehension may be more important than just understanding. It must be graspable by even the weakest of minds; by even the unintelligent mind. Just like you train a dog not to be vicious or like you break a wild horse, that's the way you have to go about teaching understanding to angry human beings, human beings on constant killing missions; human beings entangled in webs woven by imaginary deadly spiders; one needs comprehension to get out of such an entanglement; one needs an understanding of how that web got woven around us and then how to deconstruct that web and set us all free.

True freedom would be so much more fun that hating everybody and everything that you don't understand or who doesn't understand you. Off-the-wall folks have gotten ahold of this world's power and these are not PEACEFUL folks; no, they are fanatically belligerent and always threatening DEATH and destruction. What if instead we threatened LIFE and reconstruction? Halliburton and Exxon Mobil have made enough profits off of this illegal and unholy mess to totally rebuild the whole of Iraq and still come out with billions of dollars in profits--except what old Unka Dick's gonna take out of the till for his own peace that passeth all understanding.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

From Herr Doktor Sigmund Freud:
"...I should like to linger for a moment over our destructive instinct, whose popularity is by no means equal to its importance. As a result of a little speculation, we have come to suppose that this instinct is at work in every living being and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of inantimate matter. Thus it quite seriously deserves to be called a death instinct, while the erotic instincts represent the effort to LIVE. The death instinct turns into the destructive instinct if, with the help of special organs, it is directed outwards, on to objects. The living creature preserves its on life, so to say, by destroying an extraneous one" Sigmund Freud, Character and Culture, "Why War?" 1963, Collier Books/Macmillan.

That's pretty scary when you really understand it. It's like the Aztec's having to tear all the hearts out of their enemies while they were still beating--it's like projecting your death wish onto your extraneous subjects. Our "president's" death wish instinct is working full force; he's projecting all of his faults on nearly every country in the Middle East, either through directly killing off thousands of them or by threatening to kill off more thousands of them and their neighbors. This son of a bitch has to kill in order to stay alive. That sounds like so much science fiction, but, hell, it makes sense if you understand it. All for what? Getting the fear of death out of their crazed heads. Look at Unka Dick? He's had five heart attacks and yet not one of them humanely finished him off; so now, he projects his own death on the rest of us. When he finally keels over; he'll have a "Fuck all of you" smirk on his face, plus he will have witnessed hundreds of thousands of people die in his safe and secure We the People protected otherwise worthless life. Guys like Unka Dick, however, seem to live forever unless we are lucky enough that some of them commit suicide; Strom Thurmond is a recent example of a man with an evil heart whose hatred and death wish projecting--especially on black people--kept the old bastard alive for over 90-plus years. Evil is Live spelled backwards. Think backwards like the Bush Babies and their faithful followers and though their actions to us sane folks are extremely evil, to them, their evil is "to live" since they see everything backwards and evil backwards is (to) live (a verb).

Happy projecting.