Monday, January 29, 2018

Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean

Imagine a country where rich, very very few very very rich people, are adjusting the political structure for their benefit. They are so oppressed, put upon, controlled by the government that they can’t do whatever they want. If they want to build a factory somewhere to exploit labor so they can get richer they can do that. But these damn government regulations will not allow them to just dump the waste products into the nearby river. This is outrageous. It infringes on their basic rights as human rich people to do as they please. If some people downstream get ill or even die from the poison that the factory dumped in the river, well that is too bad. Those people should have just had the personal initiative to do something better for themselves so they could go live somewhere else rather than whining to the government to protect them from progress.

This book is basically about the builders of an economic theory fabricated in service to the rich. It is called Libertarianism. The people into it claim that they believe that it will somehow magically make everyone prosperous simply by taking a hands-off approach when it comes to their beloved “Economic liberty”. Libertarianism is also magnetic to the politically naive who think it’s for freedom, no drug laws etc. And it is, or claims to be, but the main thrust behind it is something different.
The main man in the book is James McGill Buchanan who was financed at various universities by two billionaires Scafe and later Charles Koch (this guy again!!). This theory is based on very little but belief, it’s a sort of economic political religion. And much if it has racist and reactive roots. The book in the beginning explains the events after Brown v. Board of Education ruling that lead to the federal government forcing integration of the racist education systems in the USA. This did not go down well in Virginia. They struggled to find ways around it, via private school vouchers and other means. One county in Virginia simply closed its public schools, for years, from 1959 to 1964, that is 5 years. The federal government finally forced them to reopen the schools. (As an aside, I’m not a big fan of schooling as it is done in the USA. I would be curious if any of those as children without school during those years somehow benefitted. It is possible.)
At any rate, they appear to want no government other than having a structure to protect private property. That would include the military. The government is also useful in acquiring future properties not usefully developed, but with people living there uselessly and stubbornly in the way.

Anyway I guess how it all works is that guys like the Koch Bros need to get rich enough that, well something will happen then and everybody will be rich. I mean everyone important. If a bunch of people die off in the process this is simply the cost of progress and in the long run it’s ok. Their lives didn’t matter for that much anyway. Some humans just fail. And that’s just as well because we need to breed the best not all these other people, if we can call them that.
And don’t let them organize. Collectivization is not encouraged, actually quite the opposite, buying all the land, or taking it by force, tossing people off it so they can’t even grow their own food. Of course they can organize themselves into corporations and get just as big as they want. Business collectives are OK, workers, or people concerned about ecology, etc., no.
The most pure wouldn’t even go for that. Koch Industries is privately owned in the family. It’s not a public corporation. Anyway, I think these people are quite insane and anti human.
James McGill Buchanan went to Chile during the fascist coup and help them design a lovely new constitution that tilted toward business and against the people having much power.. But these libertarians think that was great work and hold up fascist Chile as the example of what the USA needs to do. That’s part of the long plan now to maneuver for a constitutional convention and write a new one for the USA in their favor
.
It’s really a fascinating read. Scary as it is.
People are crazy. Oh and they think that everyone has their same emotional set-up, that the deep wish of us all is that we had a kingdom of our own and people we could boss around.
Hey! I don’t feel that way. I don’t want subjects or slaves. There is something wrong with these people. If they were in our hunter-gatherer group we would probably find a way to drive them away or bump them off.
But we can’t do that now, can we?
So they just grow in power and spread their poison logic and, if not stopped somehow, are very likely to win.

Monday, January 22, 2018

The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot

I had a certain amount of trepidation as I started reading this book. I knew I was entering the heart of the ugliness of the USA, for 620 pages. I’m a notoriously slow reader, so I knew I would be there for awhile.

I shouldn’t have been so concerned. This is a well written history of the CIA. It is loaded with information that was new to me as well as stories I have been hearing for decades like the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the murder of JFK..

This is really the big story of the 20th Century when global technological resources developed to the extent that the have nots were in a position to move on the haves.
Dulles helped developed  the CIA into a secret army working to buttress the holdings of the haves. The book is a working bio of Dulles as a spy. He began as a Harvard educated Wall Street corporate lawyer. He ended as a government official who really functioned as a Wall Street corporate lawyer. The interest of big business was always at the center of his actions and the actions he manipulated the USA into.

He goes through the story of the CIA engineering the coup in Iran in 1953 which put the Shah back in power until 1979. During this time the CIA assisted him in setting up Secret police units that eliminated all opposition other than that embedded in religion, which lead to the religious sectors of society to eventually gaining control rather than a more secular setup that could have been possible with Mossadegh. But this is the history of much of the CIA meddling on behave of corporate business, keeping countries business friendly even if large sections of the population suffered as a result. The USA spreads a good deal of suffering over the world.

The end of the book spends a good deal of space to evidence linking the CIA to the JFK and RFK assassinations. He certainly presents a powerful case of motivation and procedural ability. Of course I’m familiar with and tend to go along with this view of events.

I had not heard of the 1961 coup attempt in France, to ouste Charles de Gaulle and install a right wing government. That was rather shocking to read about and of course there was the good old CIA helping to establish and supporting the perpetrators.

Unfortunately, I’m not able to generate much anger about this stuff anymore, I mean anger that the country I live in spends a great deal of its resources making the lives of people in other countries miserable without much person autonomy under some thuggish government that is friendly the international business interests. And it’s not like these international corporations are even Americans, they aren’t particularly loyal to the USA as their business interests are pushed on other  countries by CIA action as in the 1973 CIA supported coup in Chile, the other 9/11.

No, I’m not angry, just frustrated and sad that this has been the trajectory of the USA my entire life span.
I hope you can do something about it in the future, and that the blowback is not as horrible as it might justifiably be.

Anyway, this mysterious institution, that does more or less what it pleases secretly with an enormous amount of tax money, just goes on its merry way. Maybe we hear about what they do later, but probably not since the government at behest of big business is growing more and more fascistic secretive and controlling.



Sunday, January 14, 2018

{rec-og-nize} the voices of bisexual men Edited by Robyn Ochs & H. Sharif Williams

This is a collection of testimonials from bisexual men expressing how they feel about their situation in the USA territory in which they live.
The stories vary because there are a lot of different layers of this since no one is really alike with sexual things, I mean, if they are honestly looked into, explored.

Most in the book, are happy to be bi. Some feel oppressed, unseen, by the outer world’s reaction to them and somewhat bitter about the whole thing. Many are annoyed by the bipolar assumptions of our time and see them as inaccurate, in the least, to intentionally dismissive of the variation they are. 
They express feelings of not being comfortable with either of these poles. 

I agree. The born this way gay culture is clearly not for me anymore than the exclusively heterosexual assumptions. So here is what I might write if I were involved with a book like this.

I consider myself lucky to be somewhere on the bisexual spectrum. I like to think that I am closer to basic pre-conditioned and trained, civilized,  humanness by being this way, natural and more wild. 

This is not a new concept for me. I have been like this for as long as I can remember. I mean from childhood back in Ohio where there were sexual encounters with other boys playing around doing this and that.
But even though that went on and was not unusual and really quite natural there was a sort of prohibition given USA sex attitudes and this was Ohio in the 1950s and early 60s. All this activity was done in secret, certainly away from parents. Yet it went on, not with all boys, but certainly not restricted to one or two boys. I guess I just assumed that it was what we did because it was fun and exciting with partly getting away with something.

But that period was tricky for me. There was an older boy who lived behind our little ranch style house in Ohio. I’ll call him Woody, because that was his name. I have been wondering how much older he was than me and just now did some internet poking around and found a man who kind of has to be him and who graduated from high school in 1965 which would make him at least 4 and probably 5 years older than I because I was born in November and  unusually young when I began school at age 5, too young, but that’s another issue. Well, this kid was somehow into me sexually and he was involved with an incident that looms large in my mind because it was so terrible at the time.

 There was a big apple orchard near where I lived and beyond the end of the orchard, a woods and a lake. One summer afternoon I was out with some of the older boys who I loved hanging out with. The frozen moment outside at the end of the orchard has the boys standing around me and me kneeling. I remember being persuaded to put someone’s penis in my mouth. I’m not sure how old I was then but I know it was before junior high because we had moved out of that neighborhood before I went to junior high. So I’m guessing 10 or 11, but I could have been younger since I lived in that house since age 5. And knowing what I know now it is probably better if I was 10 or younger than say 12 if the other boys were all Woody’s age 4 or 5 years older. Because then they would be getting rather old to be fooling around with this kid. And one would hope, being older, they could have come up with a more secure play area.

That day we were suddenly discovered by some girls and enough was going on and exposed that the girls had something to tell. The next thing I knew I was in the kitchen being interrogated by both of my parents regarding if I had put someone’s “pee pee” in my mouth. Honestly sitting here now I don’t know if I did or not. I remember some reluctance at the moment but that could have been added on later to support my story to my parents that nothing went on. Years later my dad told me that he had caught me with Woody another time in Woody’s family’s shed. 


Now when I look at Woody’s two Facebook photos and read about how he spent his life, I find it interesting that he has chosen male power roles being an auxiliary cop, involvement with military and some marshal training thing. And there he is as an old man wearing navy whites with 4 small children standing with him, the only other people in his photos. I not saying he went on from back then to career predator, but those guys come from somewhere I suppose. 


So is this my #metoo moment? 

It could very well be. Woody had no other reason to be involved with me. I was just a little kid who lived down the hill. He had what I wanted, which was to be acceptable to these older boys. 

Did this hurt me?

I mean I’m aware that my relationships with other men are not normal, whatever that means. I don’t have any close men friends. 

I would describe part of my reaction to others men as being somewhat homophobic. By that I don’t mean some sort of hatred but rather a suspicion that they might be interested in something or that I am and all that is just below the surface and enough to confuse the desire to get together. It’s a subtle emotional background thing. After all, little me might think, what else do I have to offer being not otherwise successful or engaged in popular male interests? 

Is this related to why I have been such an outsider with no career or anything like that when I had some sort of raw potential that is only apparent in hindsight.
I have stayed away from men professionally. I was in a band but it was with women, no men would want me in a band with them. I don’t rock!


So what goes on with me with men? I periodically seek anonymous encounters in places set up for that and maybe have a little oral or manual interaction. I don’t know maybe trying to recreate the setting at that moment in the orchard since it was loaded with such energy, emotion and interest. It doesn’t matter if they are old or younger. 

But then I think I’m not that interested in men. I don’t see that many who I feel attracted to. Not into beefcake stuff and all that. Not interested in a man being involved with my emotions and have ugly thoughts that they are simply not that sharp, bright, or emotionally sophisticated enough to bother with. Or that they have some power agendum, want to sell me on something, want to check out what team I’m on maybe even politically. (Ugly because since I don’t hang with men I’m probably talking about something within me, within my own self image.)


So there you have it. I’m rather old now. Have a really lovely open relationship with a woman who can understand, so now that sex with other women is basically over due to my age and contentedness with my friend. I can say that I’m not on team straight and have no interest in being straight in its homo and hetro variations.
Feeling more free and loved in my relationship I have been having more male sex encounters than in the past when it was dormant for long periods or really toned way down. This feels healthy for me.
I think it might be interesting to have an actual male lover appear although I’m not searching. But people do just show up in my life with no effort from me.


I was in high school in Ohio when The Stonewall Action happened which is said to have set off the Gay Liberation movement. I remember thinking then, while I was just starting to be sexually active with girls my age, that the ideal with me was bi, capable of both clearly. I was not about to pick a team and never will. 


Anyway, interesting book with writers of various abilities in self expression.
(You can deal with that if you’ve read this far.)

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Keepers of the Story By Micah Springer



In 1993 when Micah Springer was 20, she, with a college friend, like so many other young USAers, when for a year long foreign adventure.
But these two very young women from Colorado didn’t go to France or Spain, they went to Africa.

They sure did have an adventure, a life changing one, but they changed those they met as well. They traveled poor, staying low to the earth, where the life, the action, is. Down were life is still connected to the earth, not sanitized and remote like the world they came from and eventually had to return to. What does that proximity to the earth mean to a human other than making one more dusty? I read here of deep and subtle things, the feel, the smell, the feet on the ground moving long distances that USAers would not even consider, especially out in the heat and wind and oh! yeah, lions. I read of transcendence from our western way, we who have lost ourselves in thought, mediating everything with our minds rather than living direct in the now. The book is about human love leading to trencendance form the thought ego. This love is not just for the person, but the world the person has emerged form, a world that is lost to most USAers.

The story is told with direct text meets the poetic, the only kind of language really functional in this kind of story. Micah Springer tells her story of deep earth love that she shares with a family in Kenya.
When I say deep earth love, it is not to evoke an image of hearts floating in air and happily ever after with something substantial to hold on to. I mean the place one goes, that place of vulnerability where all the warmth and light can reach and all the loss and pain penetrate. The place where one has to grow somehow to be able to digest it all, to find some warm peace again after the real polarity of life, love, immersion.
This is part of the sad joyous memoir by Micah Springer.

This is a blog about personal reactions to media, I don’t do “reviews”.
The book had me recalling my own very late youthful trip. It was not nearly as extreme, just Europe, mostly Spain, mostly Barcelona. And I was already older, in my 30s when I spent my almost year abroad.  
What in the book made me recall this is the intense emotional attachments that can transpire when USAers show up somewhere else. I too was with someone, actually riding on her youthful adventure, she was still only just into the 20s.This was in the mid-1980s just a few years before the main trip recounted in the book.

What hurts me now, when I think about it is what happened to the two seperate people who were a big part of our life in Barcelona. Alec and Maribel were our only friends and somehow on returning they were lost. The parent, whose apartment address they had for our USA contact moved or something, I forget the details. What matters is, we were there, we returned, they loved us, and we loved them in return, and they never heard from us again. That makes me feel ashamed and sad.
It makes me feel like some privileged USAer who was in Europe on a lark, met some wonderful open people and then vanished, as if we no longer needed and cared about them after they served their purpose for us.
That is a rotten feeling.

Things go on in the book that reminded me of this although in Springer’s story it’s more extreme, intimate, and fortunately doesn’t just end with back to USA and normal American life.
This is a thought provoking and emotionally satisfying memoir.

I came to the book through hearing Micah Springer on the podcast Tangentially Speaking, by Christopher Ryan. They had a nice chat. It’s archived if you are interested.

MOM

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